Best cell phone deals: get the most satisfaction and the least grief. some 47,000 readers tell you how.(Survey)

Cell-phone service seems to stubbornly resist improvement. The Annual Survey of Cell-Phone Service conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center found that fewer than half of respondents were completely or very satisfied. That makes cell service among the lower-rated services we survey, as it has been for the past six years.

Still, there are bright spots. Verizon and Alltel scored better than other providers this year, as they have in the past. T-Mobile matched satisfaction rates for Verizon in almost all the cities we surveyed. And T-Mobile plans generally offer more for the money than those of Verizon and Alltel.

Meanwhile, cell carriers are getting more consumer-friendly. Last fall, most pledged to prorate their hefty $150 to $200 early-termination fees and end their heavy-handed practice of mandatory contract extensions when you make changes to your service plan.

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Mandatory contract extensions were one of the top two complaints of survey respondents, tied with high costs for service. More than 60 percent of respondents who made changes to their service plan in the past year said they were required to extend their contract as part of the deal. That number might understate the problem because some carriers haven't always been up front with customers about such extensions, according to allegations in recent legal filings.

In the past five years, consumer advocates such as the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, in Santa Monica, Calif., and class-action lawyers have filed more than 100 lawsuits coast to coast, according to an analysis by Thomson West, a legal-information-services firm. The cases involve issues such as early-termination fees, calculation of airtime, arbitration requirements, class-action prohibitions, rebates, and other contract provisions.

One important outcome was a spate of recent court decisions in several states that struck down as "unconscionable" cell service contract provisions that had forced customers to arbitrate disputes individually and prohibited them from banding together into class actions. "In the last 18 months, there has been a sea change and a run of court decisions favoring consumers," says Paul Bland, staff attorney with Public Justice, a nonprofit public-interest law firm in Washington, D.C., and an expert on class-action bans in consumer contracts.