I had the chance to do a bit of travelling with my Virgin Mobile phone and I was able to verify digital coverage in all of my usual away from home locations. This was pretty much as expected as VM uses the Sprint network for coverage. There was no roaming anywhere. The signal strength meter was consistently at four or five bars out of five.
From examination of VM's marketing, I can see why they are able to sell the basic service component so cheaply. It looks like they're making a lot, if not most, of their revenue from sales of secondary services: downloads of ringtones, music, and other material aimed at the 13 to 25 year old MTV demographic. As long as the teenyboppers can be persuaded to pony up US$2-3 or more for downloads, I can enjoy my US$0.10 per minute peak time long distance. Heh, heh.