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Cellular Monopoly areas

I just finished a working vacation in North Carolina, and I was very surprised to find out that certain areas of the state have, for practical purposes, only one cellular provider.

I spent a lot of time in the area around Burnsville, looking for a home my wife and I can retire in, and although my Tracphone would work more-or-less "OK" inside the city limits, anytime I travelled more than a couple of miles outside them, I was out-of-service.

Everyone I talked to about it said the same thing: "Only Verizon works around here".

This raises several questions, first among them being "Where are the competitors"? The area is growing, and ISTM that there would be at least one alternative to such a sole-source situation.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Horne
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In rural areas? Hahahaha. Once you get very far away from big cities and big roads, they're not interested.

Helpful tip: Android Tracfones run on Verizon's network. Even if you don't want all the smartphone stuff, they're perfectly competent phones, and they give you triple minutes and triple texts.

R's, John

Reply to
John Levine

According to

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... even Verizon has no service around Burnsville if you get very far from the highway.

Reply to
Retired

I've run into similar problems when visiting relatives in Rumford, Maine. Like Burnsville, Rumford is a small town only a few miles from the Appalachian Trail. Sparsely populated areas get fewer cell towers than more crowded places, and towers in mountainous regions tend to provide less coverage than their peers in flatter places (due to all those mountains getting in the way). So none of this is especially surprising.

Bob Goudreau Cary, NC

Reply to
Bob Goudreau

In my experience, you can never know who the active carriers anywhere are.

This past weekend, for example, in the Fresh Meadows subsection of Queens, NY, in and just outside one particular Chinese restaurant, a friend was unable to raise a Verizon signal, while I found high T-Mobile signal strength.

And last Fall, in the generalized Londonderry, VT, area, I found that a change of position of just a few hundred feet could move me from a spot with no Verizon coverage but plentiful T-Mobile service to one with no T-Mo service but strong Verizon coverage.

Sprint? AT&T? No idea -- I carry no handsets activated to those carriers.

HTH. Cheers, -- tlvp

Reply to
tlvp

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