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Comment by blitmap | Hacker News Reader

My impression was most of the cell towers were owned by either AT&T or Verizon - how can TMobile and others be competitive? I had assumed they were buying to use the networks of the existing 2? I know I'm uninformed, I'm asking for more info on territory.

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T-Mobile and Sprint are independent networks. Other smaller carriers, known as MVNOs (eg. MetroPCS, Cricket, Google Fi, etc), do rent the networks of the major 4 carriers, but T-Mobile and Sprint do not, which is part of why their coverage is a little worse in less populated areas. I'm not sure if T-Mobile can roam on AT&T towers (since they're both GSM, but are probably using different bands for 3G). I do know that when I'm in Yosemite with T-Mobile I don't get any reception, but I've heard that Verizon and possibly AT&T do.

T-Mobile does have roaming agreements with regional carriers such as Union Wireless, so in spots where they don't have coverage, there is occasionally roaming coverage as well, but they have basically every major metropolitan area covered.

My T-Mobile phone roams to AT&T towers, but with no data connection. Fancier plans may not have this limitation.

Side note for those who don't know the term, MVNO stands for Mobile Virtual Netwok Operator.

I believe a lot of the carriers lease their towers from companies like crown castle.

http://www.crowncastle.com/

Carriers can own towers but more commonly Sites and towers are leased to the Carriers who install their equipment.

This is especially true in urban areas where land is at a premium and it's easier to put some transceivers on another structure like a building or water tower.

As mentioned, TMo and Sprint also own/lease towers. The big 4 are all real full network operators. They all have roaming agreements with other smaller carriers in areas they don't serve, but TMo and Sprint are not MVNOs, however they both OWN MVNOs.

At Stanford, the strongest towers (on the hill) are/were AT&T (via Cingular). There are/were whole buildings with zero Verizon coverage.

Source: an enterprise Cingular sales rep whom later worked for Motion Computing.

There also used to be a spot on I-80 between SF and Sacramento where AT&T phones routinely dropped calls.

Cricket Wireless uses AT&Ts network but capped. They are owned by AT&T now so it doesnt make much difference.

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