Confused: San Francisco coverage

Darth Jeff wrote:
> I am Verizon subscriber who is considering moving to Cingular. I
> realize coverage between any carrier is different, and depends on the
> user and where he lives. I have been hearing the Cingular is really
> trying to build their network out to match Verizon. From reading both
> newsgroups some questions:
>
> 1. Does the claim that Verizon has superior coverage include AMPs?

It's unclear if Verizon's claim of "Most Reliable Network" includes
AMPS, but since they started making that claim back when most of their
handsets were tri-mode, I would think that it does.

Since the Consumer Reports and J.D. Power surveys are done every year,
and the number of AMPS handsets has been steadily decreasing, it's safe
to say that AMPS didn't play a huge part in the survey results. In some
cities there weren't big differences between carriers, but in the San
Francisco Bay Area, Verizon was rated far better than Cingular, and has
been leading them every year. It was believed that following the merger
with AT&T Wireless that Cingular would improve in its results, but
surprisingly this hasn't happened.

If the survey respondents were like me, and often travel to the nether
regions of the Bay Area and northern California, then AMPS coverage
would definitely figure into the results, though since Verizon isn't
selling many tri-mode phones anymore, AMPS was not a big factor. Of
course if they were mostly subscribers with digital-only phones, or
subscribers that never left the cities, then AMPS would not figure much
into the equation (though even in the major cities of the Bay Area there
are still areas with no digital coverage of any kind).

In the San Francisco Bay Area there are vast areas with no GSM coverage
at all, where you can get at least a Verizon AMPS signal. Of course a
lot of people never go hiking, bicycling, camping, boating, etc., and
never would know the difference.

> Because I would assume when AMPs gets turned off, or if I move off my
> tri-mode phone(I am always in digital areas) that the coverage between
> the two carriers may be more equal? Am I off-base here?

The Verizon CDMA coverage is better than the Cingular or T-Mobile GSM
coverage, but as you stated, Cingular is working on building out their
network. It seems like almost every day for the past couple of years
Cingular has issued a press release about coverage that they've added.
If you take AMPS out of the equation, Cingular will likely be close to
Verizon in the San Francisco Bay Area within a couple of years, though
due to the inherent advantages of CDMA they will never catch up.

Don't think that AMPS coverage is immediately going away the instant the
FCC allows AMPS to be turned off. In the urban areas, where there is
digital coverage, it'll be turned off, but in areas with no digital
coverage it'll stay on until Verizon can cover those areas (at least the
road areas) with digital. The roadside call boxes are all AMPS, and
these need to be converted to CDMA. There was an article a while back
stating that the spacing of call boxes would be widened at the same time
they convert to CDMA. Verizon has committed to their corporate customers
to not worsen coverage when AMPS can be turned off, but this only
applies to areas served by roads. So we'll lose a lot of coverage in
open space areas. The rural carriers will keep AMPS on because it's the
only service in vast areas of the U.S..

> 2. I am always seeing some flamewar about no Cingular coverage in San
> Francisco. Cingular's coverage map seems to have it covered. So I am
> confused there.

I haven't seen such a war. One poster continually tries to attack all
the independent surveys that show Verizon to have a wide lead over
Cingular in coverage in the San Francisco Bay Area, but this is just one
poster, with his own agenda, and no evidence to support his claims.

J.D. Power, Consumer Reports, and Bay Area Consumer Checkbook all had
surveys that ranked Verizon as far better than Cingular, and these
surveys all had very large sample sizes and extremely low margins of
error. This has also been the experience of every person that has ever
experienced both carriers.

As to moving to Cingular, only do it if you must have a single handset
and phone number to use in the U.S., and the parts of Europe and Asia
that are GSM only. In North America, CDMA service is much better than
GSM service, and Verizon's high speed data service has much better
coverage than Cingular's (Sprint also has much wider coverage with high
speed data than Cingular).

[Copied to alt.cellular.attws. Please post all alt.cellular.cingular
posts to alt.cellular.attws as well. The Cingular name is going away,
and alt.cellular.attws is the proper venue for posts regarding AT&T's
Wireless Service.]

On 2007-03-06, SMS <scharf.steven@geemail.com> wrote:
> Darth Jeff wrote:
>> 1. Does the claim that Verizon has superior coverage include AMPs?
>
> It's unclear if Verizon's claim of "Most Reliable Network" includes
> AMPS, but since they started making that claim back when most of their
> handsets were tri-mode, I would think that it does.

I don't believe that, in the Bay area at least. I've yet to be anywhere
in the Bay area which had *Verizon* AMPS coverage but which lacked
Verizon CDMA coverage. It may be I've not been everywhere yet, but
I've been a lot of places so areas where Verizon has AMPS but hasn't
added CDMA must be fairly rare.

I have seen reasonably large areas, however, which have AT&T AMPS coverage
but no digital service detectable to me (no GSM at least; there might
be TDMA). An example of this is the area in the vicinity of 94020.
You can get analog service on a Sprint phone some places here. The
problem for Verizon users is that, unless things have changed recently,
with Verizon's current plans their phones no longer roam onto Cingular
AMPS, so a new Verizon customer gets no service here. I lost this
coverage when I switched from Sprint to Verizon.

So I doubt that Verizon makes any claims based on AMPS coverage in
the Bay area since Verizon doesn't seem to have much AMPS-only coverage
and they don't (officially) allow roaming on Cingular AMPS, and that's
all the AMPS there is in the Bay area.

I have heard a rumor, however, that Verizon has recently started to
allow free roaming on Cingular AMPS for AC2 customers, but I've not
been places where I could test this recently.

Dennis Ferguson

Dennis Ferguson wrote:
> On 2007-03-06, SMS <scharf.steven@geemail.com> wrote:
>> Darth Jeff wrote:
>>> 1. Does the claim that Verizon has superior coverage include AMPs?
>> It's unclear if Verizon's claim of "Most Reliable Network" includes
>> AMPS, but since they started making that claim back when most of their
>> handsets were tri-mode, I would think that it does.
>
> I don't believe that, in the Bay area at least. I've yet to be anywhere
> in the Bay area which had *Verizon* AMPS coverage but which lacked
> Verizon CDMA coverage. It may be I've not been everywhere yet, but
> I've been a lot of places so areas where Verizon has AMPS but hasn't
> added CDMA must be fairly rare.

I could give you a list of a lot of places! Parts of Mount Tam, parts of
Big Basin, parts of Tilden park, parts of Forest of Nisene Marks state
park, areas north of Pescadero on Pescadero Road in San Mateo County,
much of Old La Honda Road, actually quite a bit of rural San Mateo County.

Verizon AMPS is widely used in the Bay Area, including for the roadside
call boxes on many of the roads.

On Tue, 06 Mar 2007 14:50:47 -0800, SMS <scharf.steven@geemail.com>
wrote in <45edf04c$0$27214$742ec2ed@news.sonic.net>:

>Dennis Ferguson wrote:
>> On 2007-03-06, SMS <scharf.steven@geemail.com> wrote:
>>> Darth Jeff wrote:
>>>> 1. Does the claim that Verizon has superior coverage include AMPs?
>>> It's unclear if Verizon's claim of "Most Reliable Network" includes
>>> AMPS, but since they started making that claim back when most of their
>>> handsets were tri-mode, I would think that it does.
>>
>> I don't believe that, in the Bay area at least. I've yet to be anywhere
>> in the Bay area which had *Verizon* AMPS coverage but which lacked
>> Verizon CDMA coverage. It may be I've not been everywhere yet, but
>> I've been a lot of places so areas where Verizon has AMPS but hasn't
>> added CDMA must be fairly rare.
>
>I could give you a list of a lot of places! Parts of Mount Tam, parts of
>Big Basin, parts of Tilden park, parts of Forest of Nisene Marks state
>park, areas north of Pescadero on Pescadero Road in San Mateo County,
>much of Old La Honda Road, actually quite a bit of rural San Mateo County.

None of those are true.

>Verizon AMPS is widely used in the Bay Area, including for the roadside
>call boxes on many of the roads.

Also not true.

--
Best regards, FAQ FOR CINGULAR WIRELESS:
John Navas <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cingular_Wireless_FAQ>

On 2007-03-06, SMS <scharf.steven@geemail.com> wrote:
> Dennis Ferguson wrote:
>> On 2007-03-06, SMS <scharf.steven@geemail.com> wrote:
>>> Darth Jeff wrote:
>>>> 1. Does the claim that Verizon has superior coverage include AMPs?
>>> It's unclear if Verizon's claim of "Most Reliable Network" includes
>>> AMPS, but since they started making that claim back when most of their
>>> handsets were tri-mode, I would think that it does.
>>
>> I don't believe that, in the Bay area at least. I've yet to be anywhere
>> in the Bay area which had *Verizon* AMPS coverage but which lacked
>> Verizon CDMA coverage. It may be I've not been everywhere yet, but
>> I've been a lot of places so areas where Verizon has AMPS but hasn't
>> added CDMA must be fairly rare.
>
> I could give you a list of a lot of places! Parts of Mount Tam, parts of
> Big Basin, parts of Tilden park, parts of Forest of Nisene Marks state
> park, areas north of Pescadero on Pescadero Road in San Mateo County,
> much of Old La Honda Road, actually quite a bit of rural San Mateo County.

I haven't been to Mount Tam for a long time, and it was all roaming
when I had a Sprint phone. For the Santa Cruz mountain bits, however,
the Verizon coverage map agrees with me, not you. For AC2 the Verizon
coverage map shows no AMPS-only coverage anywhere around the big white spot
including 94020; I have personal experience that a Verizon phone on the
AC2 plan gets no AMPS coverage there either, even though I can use Verizon
AMPS anywhere it is available (tested by forcing the phone to analog
since there's always CDMA). This area only shows roaming coverage under
AC1, or on the Sprint map, and my Sprint phone did indeed get service
in there. That is because the AMPS towers are Cingular, not Verizon.
And if your phone is such that you are mistaking this for Verizon AMPS
I'm not sure I can trust your evaluation of the other spots you mention.

I have a friend who lives in La Honda who was an AT&T customer for
a long time, and who now has Sprint service for the above reason. If there
are people in the Santa Cruz mountains who prefer Verizon they must
live further south, closer to Highway 9, where Verizon does have coverage.

Dennis Ferguson

Dennis Ferguson wrote:

> have a friend who lives in La Honda who was an AT&T customer for
> a long time, and who now has Sprint service for the above reason. If there
> are people in the Santa Cruz mountains who prefer Verizon they must
> live further south, closer to Highway 9, where Verizon does have coverage.

My experience is all with AC1. I do a lot of cycling and hiking
throughout the Santa Cruz mountains, and the southern part of San Mateo
county. In many of these areas I get only AMPS coverage. I have no
handset with AC2, so I can't comment on AC2 coverage. I presume that its
Verizon AMPS and not AT&T AMPS since I've never been charged roaming,
and because I know that Verizon AMPS is used on most of the roadside
call boxes on the roads that have call boxes.

What you have to realize about coverage maps is that if the tower has
both digital and AMPS, then they will show that area as digital. However
you'll get AMPS service for a much longer distance away from the tower
than you'll get CDMA service (or GSM service for that matter).

My wife's company had been using Nextel, which was an extremely foolish
thing to do because they send their field people out to every niche and
corner of the Bay Area (though not Santa Cruz county). In fact the
nature of the business is that the rural residents are more likely to
use the service than the urban residents that could more easily come in
for service. So all the field people had to have a personal phone that
had AMPS service for the areas with no Nextel service. Sometimes the
call they needed to make was as mundane as calling the homeowner to tell
them to come out and restrain their dogs so the field person could get
out of the car! They're now switching to Verizon with the V325i,
partially for AMPS, and partially for the GPS capability, neither of
which is available on Cingular or Nextel.

On Tue, 06 Mar 2007 17:26:49 -0800, SMS <scharf.steven@geemail.com>
wrote in <45ee14de$0$27188$742ec2ed@news.sonic.net>:

>What you have to realize about coverage maps is that if the tower has
>both digital and AMPS, then they will show that area as digital. However
>you'll get AMPS service for a much longer distance away from the tower
>than you'll get CDMA service (or GSM service for that matter).

What matters is handset power, not technology -- digital has as much
range as analog -- range is primarily a matter of handset power and line
of sight.

--
Best regards, FAQ FOR CINGULAR WIRELESS:
John Navas <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cingular_Wireless_FAQ>

On 2007-03-07, SMS <scharf.steven@geemail.com> wrote:
> Dennis Ferguson wrote:
>
>> have a friend who lives in La Honda who was an AT&T customer for
>> a long time, and who now has Sprint service for the above reason. If there
>> are people in the Santa Cruz mountains who prefer Verizon they must
>> live further south, closer to Highway 9, where Verizon does have coverage.
>
> My experience is all with AC1. I do a lot of cycling and hiking
> throughout the Santa Cruz mountains, and the southern part of San Mateo
> county. In many of these areas I get only AMPS coverage. I have no
> handset with AC2, so I can't comment on AC2 coverage. I presume that its
> Verizon AMPS and not AT&T AMPS since I've never been charged roaming,
> and because I know that Verizon AMPS is used on most of the roadside
> call boxes on the roads that have call boxes.

Yes, I remember you also saying you weren't charged for roaming
on Cingular AMPS in Florida too. I don't know if you lead a charmed
life or if there's something wrong with my phone or PRL, but when
I've tried I got no service from Cingular AMPS on my AC2 Verizon phone
where my Sprint phone got it. I also have a friend who I think is a
Verizon customer who told me he once had to phone 911 back there when
is phone was getting service with no bars. He dialed 911 and the call
connected, but when he was done he said he now had an "Emergency Only"
all-bar analog signal. The only way he could get rid of it and make the
phone search for native service again was by powering the phone
off and on. I think his phone also didn't roam on Cingular AMPS.
I'd been assuming that anywhere Verizon (or Airtouch or PacTel)
didn't have towers the state just got AT&T (or Cellular One?) to
provide call box service instead, which might also explain why Cingular
would keep towers on that most of their customers can't use.

Note that I haven't had a phone for a while that would tell me who
the service is coming from, and my friend's use of Sprint service
doesn't necessarily prove anything since Sprint is fairly promiscuous
about roaming these days. I know for sure that my friend used to
use AT&T service back there, even though there's no digital Cingular
service now, that I lost service in there when I moved from Sprint to AC2
Verizon, and that the Verizon AC2 coverage map has big areas of white
where AC1 (and Sprint) think (and I know) there might be analog service.
If it were all Verizon AMPS, AC1 and AC2 wouldn't be different. I can
see no assumption that explains this better than that this is AT&T,
not Verizon, AMPS.

> What you have to realize about coverage maps is that if the tower has
> both digital and AMPS, then they will show that area as digital. However
> you'll get AMPS service for a much longer distance away from the tower
> than you'll get CDMA service (or GSM service for that matter).

This we'll probably need to disagree on, since I can't see a way it
could possibly be true. I have a paper somewhere from people at Qualcomm
which does a theoretical analysis to find that CDMA has an 11 db Eb/No
power advantage over FM AMPS (6 db for CDMA versus 17 db for FM); that
is (assuming not much sharing of the CDMA channel to boost No) a
200 mW CDMA phone should operate over the same distance as a >2W AMPS phone.
I admit this result is convenient for Qualcomm since we've all given up
2W phones for 200 mW phones. I also freely admit that Qualcomm has probably
made at least one other over-optimistic assertion about CDMA performance,
that FM is useable with less than perfect signal where CDMA might not be and
that I don't understand enough about the theory to critically evaluate
the assumptions which lead to 11 db. What I can tell you with great
certainty, however, is that a 200 mW CDMA phone will always get better
distance that a 200 mW AMPS phone, which is what we're comparing here.
+11 db is a huge enough theoretical difference that there is just no way
it could actually be a negative number in real life.

You might want to consider the possibility that, when you are getting
AMPS service but have lost the digital service, that what you are seeing
isn't the longer reach AMPS but rather AMPS from a different company,
like in the Santa Cruz mountains. Your phone seems to roam freely
to Cingular, Cingular clearly has sites with no GSM yet, and I think
your explanation disagrees with the physics.

Dennis Ferguson

Dennis Ferguson wrote:

> Yes, I remember you also saying you weren't charged for roaming
> on Cingular AMPS in Florida too. I don't know if you lead a charmed
> life or if there's something wrong with my phone or PRL, but when
> I've tried I got no service from Cingular AMPS on my AC2 Verizon phone
> where my Sprint phone got it.

I went back and looked at the call details for the time I was out in the
Everglades and there were no roaming charges for those calls (I had
assumed there were none since the monthly charges hadn't changed, but I
had never checked the call details, and thought that maybe those calls
would be billed later). It's been three months now, so I don't think any
roaming calls are going to show up. I did some international roaming in
February, and those charges showed up right away, so they're good about
quick billing even though they claim that such calls may not appear on
the bill right away.

> I also have a friend who I think is a
> Verizon customer who told me he once had to phone 911 back there when
> is phone was getting service with no bars. He dialed 911 and the call
> connected, but when he was done he said he now had an "Emergency Only"
> all-bar analog signal. The only way he could get rid of it and make the
> phone search for native service again was by powering the phone
> off and on. I think his phone also didn't roam on Cingular AMPS.
> I'd been assuming that anywhere Verizon (or Airtouch or PacTel)
> didn't have towers the state just got AT&T (or Cellular One?) to
> provide call box service instead, which might also explain why Cingular
> would keep towers on that most of their customers can't use.

On my old Motorola 270C I could manually switch to the alternate AMPS
network, and I'd get "American Roaming Network" and be prompted for a
credit card. When I try my old DPC550 AMPS phone, it goes to Verizon's
AMPS network, and they tell me I have no service and to contact Verizon
to set up a temporary account. So I know that both AMPS networks are
still operating in my area (of course they are because they aren't
allowed to be turned off until 2008).

> Note that I haven't had a phone for a while that would tell me who
> the service is coming from, and my friend's use of Sprint service
> doesn't necessarily prove anything since Sprint is fairly promiscuous
> about roaming these days.

Yeah, the only way I know what AMPS network I'm on is if I use an
unactivated Verizon AMPS phone and switch between A and B. One side is
Verizon, one side is ARN (but I assume that this would be AT&T if I was
using an old AT&T AMPS phone, but I don't have one.