I am a Unicel agent at this time and soon to be a Verizon agent, I watched Unicel grow to become the 20th largest wireless company in the nation, until purchased by Verizon. This type of merger was very predictable, I too thought that At&T or T-Mobile would have purchased Unicel however this was not the case. I love GSM, and I can do things with it that you can't with cdma. Now in my opinion the reason they purchased Unicel was because they wanted to stop the roaming on USC system, and at the same time collect the check from At&T and T-Mobile for roaming on Unicel's GSM system which is not shabby at all.
Verizon is putting out a lot of cash to replace everyones phones, and build out a complete cdma network that will overlay the currant GSM network. Unicel customers will have all of the cool features that Verizon customers now have in the cities Vcast, Navigation, Push to talk, Broadband speed data.
Verizon spends 1 billion on thier network every 60 days, and so far from what I have seen here this is true. Verizon's plans don't compare at this time with Unicel's plans, however this could change at anytime, anyone that is a Unicel customer now can keep thier currant plan if they take one of the offered free phones. I think it would be in the Unicel customers best interest to at least try it first before jumping to something else.
Steve