Hello, you're in the dead zone
> Region's cellphone users still have problems making, keeping connections
> By Matt Viser, Globe Staff | January 29, 2006
> You're driving along, talking on your phone. It could be something as
> mundane as trying to determine which cereal to pick up at the grocery
> store or as crucial as trying to seal a business deal.
> Then come the unexplained silences, the fragments of talk, and the
> sudden realization that the other person's just not there.
> You've been trapped. In a cellphone dead zone.
> Even as cellular phones have become necessities of modern life and
> companies have tried to improve service, it's still possible to find
> yourself in a dead zone in Boston's western suburbs, according to
> residents and a survey by Globe West.
> "Our area is full of cellphone dead spots," said Stephanie Price, a
> 33-year-old Cingular Wireless subscriber who lives in the Waban
> section of Newton. "There is literally no way to drive to my house
> and not drop a call."
> To examine how reliably the phones work these days, a Globe West
> reporter took comparable phones from the four companies serving
> Massachusetts -- Cingular Wireless, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile USA, and
> Verizon Wireless -- on a 150-mile tour of the area.
> Calls were made on each phone from the same location within a
> one-minute period, and a record was kept of whether calls went through
> clearly on the first try, had an obviously weak connection, or failed
> to connect after three attempts.
> A total of 480 phone calls were made from 120 locations ranging from
> Newton to Boylston and from Norfolk to Lincoln.
> Sixty-two of the calls, or about 13 percent, didn't connect on the > first try.
>
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I note that wherever I go in RI, Verizon seems to have very good coverage. But the article has obvious falsehoods, like former AT&T towers not talking to Cingular towers. It's because Cingular and AT&T used differnt protocols, one was CDMA the other was GSM. They're transitioning to all GSM at the moment.
By the way -- I note that Boston.com has their odious side after all. They let you get three pages in before asking for registration, and then block cut/paste so BugMeNot won't work.