Is That Legal?

I have a Winston-Salem number and I got better service in Key West, FL and almost everywhere else OUTSIDE of NC than I did in Wilmington where I went to college.

It probably has to do with sheer RF spectrum capacity. I imagine that at Crow Creek mine, you were probably not competing for multiplexed RF spectrum with 50,000 other people, like you are on the freeway in an urban area. There is a finite amount of bandwidth, and that means dropped calls if the maximum number of users is reached. For example, my calls drop more frequently during rush hours than any other time, because everyone in the city is on their phone at once.

Pretty straightforward, really. When you move from place to place, your call is automatically switched from cell tower to cell tower as you move. In ideal circumstances, this happens seamlessly. But cell towers have capacity limits. If you move to a tower that's at capacity, it can't handle your call and you get dropped. In Chapel Hill, this probably happens where there's a high density of cell usage at peak times. In Manhattan, it happens pretty much 24 hours a day as you cross 14th Street heading north on the West Side Highway (and it drives me bonkers). In Alaska, it probably happens never.

Capacity problems can also happen further up the line at the Mobile Telephone Switching Office (MTSO). When an MTSO reaches capacity, it starts dropping calls. Providers can add extra capacity, but it's tough for them to cover the highest imaginable spike in usage. In remote Alaska, the lowest capacity MTSO probably suffices for even the highest usage period. In Chapel Hill, there are enough people with cells that if they all start dialing at once they'll overload the MTSO.

In short, your local cell provider drops calls for the same reason the Chapel Hill road network occasionally suffers traffic jams (though the roads in distant Alaska rarely do): too many people trying to use it all at once.

btw: there seems to be a glich with your spam squasher. If you miss it on the first try, it won't recognize the correct submission on subsequent tries (or at least, it won't for me).

Cingular dropped my calls so I dropped them.

I have had the same cell phone provider since 2001 and have gotten perfect reception all throughout the state of Florida. After moving to Chapel Hill last year however, everything changed. I spent all of summer and fall outside on my apartment balcony, braving all sorts of different species and bugs, in order to be able to place or receive calls on my cell phone. I also spent all of last winter huddled next to my apartment window in the hopes of picking up the faintest cell phone signal. Much to my surprise however, when I traveled to St. Thomas in the summer, not only did my cell phone work, but I had perfect cell phone reception and never once dropped or missed a call! I was even able to use it on remote beaches and high mountain tops. Now, how does that work?

The problem with the previous answers is not that they aren't technically correct, but that they don't answer the question: why do his calls get dropped? the answer is that Cingular, perhaps alone among the major cell phone companies, has slowed the expansion of its network, even as the number of subscribers has boomed as a result of its advertising. At one time they did have the most capacity per subscriber; that is no longer true (I believe Verizon does). At this point they have perhaps the worst drop record of any carrier, as far as I can tell.

I wonder if putting a cell phone tower up in Chapel Hill requires more lawyers than putting one up in rural Alaska.