Varies between 2 bars and 4 bars. Okay, never get disconnected.

Just to let you know Cingular and T-Mobile are basically he same company, both operate of the same GSM towers and T-Mobile usually roams off of cingulars.

The reception is workable - no worse than any other carrier, and I've tested Verizon and had visitors with T-Mobile and Nextel. At a certain point, you just have to accept when you aren't near a tower, reception is worse.

Although I have reason to believe it's a defect in the phone, my Samsung SGH-X427 though Cingular has some very very odd issues with the signal strength. For instance, I'll be sitting in my apartment, flip open the phone and watch it drop from 2 bars down to none. The really odd thing is that if it's sitting on my desk, flipped open it will show at least 2 or 3 bars, but will quickly fade down to 0 - 1 once I pick it up. If this happened just indoors, I'd chalk it up to poor indoor reception, but it also happens to do this outside. As I said this could very well be a defect in the phone as the signal is verry unpredictable, and only constant when it's sitting still on my desk.

My only complaint is sometimes I don't recieve a call, it immediately goes to voicemail. The Panasonic phone is excellant.