Annual Cell Tower Issues

Over the last year, I've had decent cell phone coverage by my house, although there are still too many deadspots not too far down the road. You may recall that last year the cell phone tower in my town went down for a three week duration last summer. Still, for whatever reason, I've stuck with T-Mobile through it all.

Now with the warmer weather, I noticed that again today that I had no bars of coverage on my cell phone. In another area, I had full coverage. Ok, it must be the tower again.

I went ahead and called t-mobile, yelled "English," my phone number, and other verification data into the phone until I got to an account representative. This was the Tier One person. While she tried real hard, she gave up and kicked me up to the next level before too long.

The second tier tried to make the phone roam onto another network. I kept pointing out that I have free roaming in my plan, and there are other providers in my area, and why didn't my quad band phone make friends with a new tower. She didn't know, but she put in a requisition with the engineers, and they will text me when they figure things out. More importantly, she told me that the cell tower would be up in two hours. I wasn't holding my breath.

While it took closer to three hours, and my usual four bars of coverage has dwindled to one to two, I will say that the phone is at least more than a paperweight again. Compared to last year when they only wanted to sell me a new phone, this was much better this time around.

As the cellular phone market consolidates, and increasingly the providers all have many of the same phones and similar contracts, one key way to distinguish themselves is with service. Assuming the cell tower is up and running tomorrow, T-Mobile appears to be doing tons better than last year. Then again, they had nowhere to go but up.

--Jonas