Thursday, October 30, 2008

Online Coverage Finders

All our Mountain Wireless cellular maps were transferred to a new web site last spring and have grown quite a bit since then. One of the things they added that has been surprisingly useful is a Cellular Coverage Finder page that is nothing more than links to the 'coverage locators' of the Top 9 carriers.

Previously, if you were looking for the carrier with the best coverage in one particular location, and needed a greater degree of detail than the Cellular Map Source web site would provide, you would then go to each individual cellular carrier's web site and seek out their Coverage "Viewer." With the Cellular Map Coverage Finder Page, not only can we get links to all the locators in one place, we can open each one in a separate window and compare them as we see fit.

The good news is that some carriers provide a good level of detail, especially T-Mobile. The bad news is that some carriers don't show any variation in the quality of signal to expect, and others, especially Alltel, are nearly useless. There are 3 different links to Alltel maps to give you a choice of the most usable map for you. There are a handful of carriers who just show you a map of the US with most of the country colored in. Are we supposed to be impressed?

So the next time you want to know if your phone will 'play in Peoria', there's a new convenient way to find out. We love it!

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