Can you hear me now, douchebags?
Among the many things that irritate the living hell out of me living on Cape Cod is the absolutely wretched communication infrastructure available to us here. Cable TV/internet is adequate, but FIOS is nowhere in sight. But this blog post will be about cell service.
I've been an AT&T customer for many years -- first suffering through years of subpar AT&T Wireless service using their TDMA (analog, craptastic) service and then more recently as a Cingular/AT&T customer using an EDGE-equipped phone (yes, my beloved iPhone). In between I spent a couple of years tithing to Verizon wireless.
Having a cell phone is, by most measures, a pretty important thing these days. Although I don't need it, strictly speaking, to survive, it makes life a lot easier. Probably 90 percent of my business calls come in through my cell line -- it's printed on my business card and I give it to whomever asks for it. A great deal of my personal calls are also made on my cell phone -- calls to the wife to let her know that I'll be out late or picking her up from work, calls to and from personal associates who work with me on the special ed parent's advisory council, calls to and from friends and so on. There's also the off chance that I'll need it for some emergency.
Despite this, my experience with cell service living on Cape Cod has been nothing short of wretched. I experience few dropped calls, so I guess there's a modest truth to AT&T's claims, but the actual voice quality of the calls is fucking vile. I get drop outs and breakups damn near constantly, and I can't remember the last time I had a conversation where, at some point, either I or the person with whom I am speaking says, "Can you repeat that? You just broke up."
Now AT&T is on the cusp of offering the iPhone 3G, which I can get for laying out another $199 and extending my contract another two years. As I've written about recently on Macworld, I'm not planning on rushing out and buying it -- part of the reason, as I've convinced myself, is that I think the actual technical improvements on the new iPhone are pretty mild. But really, what it comes down to, is thinking that AT&T's cell service is total shit.
Looking at their coverage area map, they say that 3G coverage blankets the Cape. But I have a very hard time believing that given how lousy their 2G coverage has been. "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" seems to be the operative way to go here.