This weekend, I had the opportunity to take my son to the Sundance Film Festival. We are doing it on a shoestring by standing in line for stand-by and wait-list tickets and camping in our VW van at an RV park. So far, it has been great fun…except for cell coverage.
No matter what carrier folks use, they are complaining about slow network speeds, dropped calls, and inability to send texts. This isn’t unique to Sundance or Park City, Utah. Almost any time a large multi-day event takes place (another example is the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas), cellular networks get completely overloaded. It seems to me that the carriers would be working overtime to make sure they can keep their network up and smooth to try and steal away customers from the competition. It appears, however, that they all just maintain the status quo and not give any more attention to these events.
Have you experienced these types of problems when travelling or attending large events? Thank goodness for my netbook, or I wouldn’t be able to post this whiny message!
Personally I haven’t had any problems with Verizon at large conventions or gatherings. I haven’t been to many, but it seems that Verizon has held pretty steady.
And in talking about CES and what I have read from people’s blogs is that iPhones were pretty much not usable there (AT&T) and that Verizon and Sprint held pretty strong. In fact, on the Engadget podcast they were talking about the Sprint data access drives and that they worked very well the entire week.
Darn it…you read through my cover!! Ok, I will admit that ATT data coverage at large events seems to be sorely lacking…you would think that with all the celebs and big wigs carrying iPhones, that ATT would want to represent and keep those customers happy. Maybe I should seriously consider the Droid or other Android phone… I jsut feel I’ve invested too much in the iPhone already and am really clicking with it after moving from Palm almost 2 years ago. Thanks for feedback.
Listen, the Droid does not go without problems. As a matter of fact, yesterday I was having a hell of a time. The Droid wouldn’t respond at all to the unlock button (the button that unlocks the screen) at all. I had to do a battery pull. Next, it would respond to the unlock button but only with a backlit, black screen. Yet another battery pull.
If you are thinking about Verizon, you definitely have some excellent choices come up. The Droid, the Eris, Palm Pre, Palm Pixi, or the Nexus One coming soon.
Man, I should be getting some moola from Verizon for all this free sales talk.
Anyways, AT&T in my area stinks. I know some friends that have iPhones and they can’t even complete calls in their own house. However, it does make me wonder if the iPhone problems are a mixture of hardware and network. The only way we will find out is when the iPhone goes “public”.
Yup, been there — and in that same general vicinity, too. We had a conference at the Zermatt in Midway a couple of years ago and the coverage was lacking. I brought my cell card so we wouldn’t have to pay for Internet in the room, but needless to say it wasn’t much help.
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