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Comment by _b8r0 | Hacker News Reader

Wait, Americans are getting dropped calls?

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.

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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.

  England: 395 people/km^2
  USA:      34 people/km^2

Also the reason why some other comparisons between Europe and the US (like energy usage) should always come with caveats.

Exactly, also a lot of European countries mandate 99.x% coverage for licenses, but the US doesn't.

I saw a billboard today from AT&T that advertised 97% coverage of the US. And that's probably optimistic.

97% of where the population is covered– by 2G. Not 97% of the US's area or with 3G or even covered with adequate capacity for high population areas.

Finland: 16 people/km^2

Almost full coverage: http://www.mobileworldlive.com/maps/network_info.php?nid=377...

Geographical area:

Finland: 330k km^2

USA: 9,692 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.

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.

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. :-)

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.

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