4g can be a good option, but in many places in the U.S. there are hills and trees in the way. For instance the "Appalachin Mountains" region is where wireless goes to die.
To an incredible degree, too. The Sprint commercials about basically being the same are true almost everywhere I've been in the past few years, so I've been using project Fi (Google's service) for a while. But every time I travel back to VA, I'm thrown back into a world of hunting for signal that I'd almost forgotten.
It's really bizarre. Where my parents live, I can be almost line-of-sight to a cell-tower operated by my carrier (literally visible across the valley, two miles away), and I get barely two bars, with calls flaking out constantly. And forget about data.
