Les Jones

Funny, when I had Verizon I was the one saying "can you hear me now". Where I live I can barely get Verizon service if I stand on my tiptoes at the west end of the front porch.

Now with Cingular I've had no problems from Tennessee to the deserts of California to northern PA to Miami. Heck, I made inexpensive calls from Limerick, Cork, Edinburgh and Inverness with no problems.

A survey of Consumer Reports readers suffers from a couple varieties of selection bias. If you really want to know which provider offers the best coverage in a given market, try to get a hold of a Telephia drive test report. I don't believe total coverage is attainable. Bringing up a new cell site can cost a quarter million dollars total, from the establishment of a search ring thru post construction testing.

Sometimes there are no suitable locations available; one suburb of Milwaukee has a zoning policy which effectively means that those of its residents whose homes are in low-lying areas get no signal. They even turned down a new flagpole (stealth antenna) for the village hall.

Cellular customers are notoriously hard to satisfy. Middday last Thursday I gave final approval (911 testing) to half the sites in an entirely new market in central Wisconsin. Friday morning the engineer I was working with had already recieved complaints of poor coverage.