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Comment by lojack | Hacker News Reader

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.

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  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.

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.

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.

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.

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