Comment Reminds me of any holiday (Score 1) 213
I spent Christmas in a GSM dead zone which is approx 5 miles from a fairly large population and an interstate. At my parents I get 0 bars with the AT&T logo which alternates to 1 bar and no signal depending on atmospheric conditions. A cloud rolled in at about 2AM whereupon I got those "merry christmas" text messages... ah nice to wake up to.
The threshold with which they paint these signal zones on their coverage map is ridiculous. Naturally it only works outdoors or in a window sill at certain times, only on one side of the house. Some parts of the house will work. Almost anywhere else I get great coverage (aside from lakes close to the afore mentioned area where summer holidays are spent). This is repeated at aunt's and grandma's but not the roads between.
Pretty much everyone in the town has Alltel and some crappy to passable CDMA tech (just from looking at them).
On another note:
The reason Japan and Korea can roll out awesome networks are social but mostly geographic. Look at Japan for instance. Surface area is tiny compared to US. Japan: 145840 square miles. Texas: 268601 square miles. Also Texas doesn't line up neatly on either side of a mountain range. Sure you can argue user density and back-haul capacity but c'mon that's just one state.