Whenever I hear of horror stories from the states about crappy phone or broadband service, I find it incredible that such an advanced country with such amazing people can have this issue.
If you don't mind, as an experiment could you possible post as a comment your location, your download bandwidth and the number of days in a month that it's up without interruption. I'd like to collate this and give the data back in some way to the HN community.
To start with:
location: Reading, England
Bandwidht: 18 Mbits download, 1.3 Mbits upload.
Number of days within a month wihthout interruption: Normally 30, although in December there were a couple of hours where there was no Internet access.
a significant portion of the US is rural and thus has less infrastructure. Its much more difficult to have cell tower coverage for 9,800,000 km^2 than for 240,000 km^2.
Despite the our higher population density, the US is almost 30 times larger than Finland. Because cell phone coverage is also a factor of area, you could safely assume that it would be (approximately) 30 times more expensive to blanket the US than Finland, yet our population density is only double.
Great in theory - but the reality is 90-95% of my dropped calls are in:
o Redwood City (Okay, I live here - but they drop _everywhere_)
o Mountain View
o 101 going south by San Mateo
That is, my calls drop in the most densely populated areas - not the least. As long as I get some reasonable number of Bars, my iPhone keeps working in the rural areas.
With that said - over the last year or so, I have been able to go sometimes as many as two or three days without a dropped call in the above areas, so I'll concur that AT&T is getting better.
I'm hoping that as everyone rushes over to Verizon, it will get even better. :-)
I get bad and dropped connections on high trafficked highways in fairly well populated east coast U.S. on both AT&T and Verizon.
If you've ever experienced the high quality and low cost of cell coverage in China (yes, even in the most rural areas and even 1 year after joining the WTO, 2001), you will keep shaking you head and your fist at companies like AT&T and Verizon.
I'm glad to see AT&T getting some competition. I hope its of the type that makes Verizon step up as well. Somehow I doubt it.
The issue is really that the cities in the US don't have the right infrastructure. In NYC I don't remember ever having a mobile phone call that wasn't dropped. Calls generally don't drop in rural areas in the USA unless it's really, really rural.
Whenever I hear of horror stories from the states about crappy phone or broadband service, I find it incredible that such an advanced country with such amazing people can have this issue.
If you don't mind, as an experiment could you possible post as a comment your location, your download bandwidth and the number of days in a month that it's up without interruption. I'd like to collate this and give the data back in some way to the HN community.
To start with: location: Reading, England Bandwidht: 18 Mbits download, 1.3 Mbits upload. Number of days within a month wihthout interruption: Normally 30, although in December there were a couple of hours where there was no Internet access.