My wife has a much abused Verizon prepaid phone. I have a prepaid ATT moto. While we were on the road this summer up thru Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana and points SE back to Florida she repeatedly got roaming warnings on her phone. I never saw one on my ATT moto. Is this something Verizon does to prepaid phones?  Also if she ever had a Verizon signal but I did not have an ATT signal, I never noticed it over 8900 miles.

This is important since I'm going to be buying her a replacement soon and wonder if we should continue with Verizon. We, unless there is an excellent reason, don't want to be locked into contracts. Tho since we are paying the prepaid fee every month I'm not sure how much difference there is monetarily. We just want functional phones and are in no way interested in $600 or more super phones.

Me especially since I do not live on my phone

We have never had a contract for any of our phones, ever. Our primary phone is ATT(Cricket) and our secondary phone is always Verizon. We have had a Verizon MVNO phone for 3-4 years and never had a problem. We recently switched to the Verizon MVNO, Visible for unlimited everything for $40 a month. This is my husbands phone that he doesn't use much but we wanted a Verizon phone for safety. Prior to our going to Canada the phone worked fine and we used it as a hot spot with no problems on our trip from Phoenix to Canada.

The Visible phone cost $100 and they had a special going on. Sent me a gift card for $100. Made the phone free.

So you didn't see roaming problems? We plan to head up to Canada next summer and at least get up to Jasper if not farther. I heard you can buy a Sim for up there.

The Verizon Visible plan does not have roaming. The Cricket plan does and it worked great the entire time we were up there. You need to switch to the Cricket plan that has roaming and allows you to use the cell phone providers up in Canada. I believe it is the $60 plan and it worked great. 

I managed to get a plan that had no limits. I understand, as of a few days ago, that plan now has a 15G limit and then potential slow down. These plans change frequently so who knows what tomorrow will bring.

FYI-The Cricket plan had some strange usage limitation but we streamed 80-100G in a month with no problems. Might be CYA.

Let me clarify a bit. We have never had to roam in the US, only in CA or MX, I don't know enough to understand why your Verizon phone was roaming.

OK that makes sense since we've had this dual phone system for years and have never seen roaming charges in the US before. She is paying $40/mo for this which is the same as their 5GB plan. So something needs to change.