Friday, August 10, 2012

T-Mobile's Thousands of Cell Sites

The T-Mobile motorcycle spokesgal has traded her blurring speed in the city for a blurring view of T-Mobile's cell sites.  Indeed, T-Mobile does have a large number of cell sites, part of which was necessitated by their shorter range PCS signals.  However, they have gone one step further and placed a few strategic cell sites in areas ignored by other carriers.  Even the king of covering undercovered areas, Commnet Wireless, has a way to go to match some of T-Mobile's surprise cell sites. 

In my home state of Colorado there are wide stretches of National Forest lands that forbid cell sites either by federal decree or a lack of infrastructure.  However, there always seems to be some kind of RF facility on a mountain peak that begs the question, "Why not here?"  T-Mobile has climbed those mountains where other carriers fear to tread, and has made us huge fans.  There was a time when it took Verizon's extensive network AND its roaming partners to give us the confidence of universal coverage.  Now they seem to be only adding sites where it makes economic sense.  T-Mobile's surprise sites actually has us stopping and scratching our heads.  Not a single home or factory is within coverage of these sites...they are are here only to serve the traveling public.  What a concept!

1 comment:

Faith Baptist Church said...

A former roommate has T-Mobile. He also likes to snowboard, and his favorite haunt is Copper Mountain. The drive there leaves him without service in some areas, but the higher he goes up Copper, the better service he gets. Full 3G too. From what I hear, even Verizon doesn't have the area covered that well, despite the fact that they hold an 850MHz license for the area.