[myrandomcomment]

In my younger years I worked at a startup that had an advisor that was one of the original technical architects at Air Touch Cellular. For those that do not know they were one of the original cell phone companies in California and the west (now AT&T). He did not own a cell phone, a fact which I found strange. I asked him why and his answer was “they screwed it all up..the deployments and coverage, it’s a solved issued but they screwed it up anyway. I will not own a cell until it works everywhere.”

[SimonPStevens]

I'd love to hear more about this.

Did he mean that there is a solved and known way to get uniform national cell phone coverage without blackspots? If so, do you know more about what his solution was.

[myrandomcomment]

No magic here. The gist of what he said was that they did a design that had 100% coverage but the company pulled back from doing that.

[Jonnax]

Sounds like he was talking about something specifically to their network.

There's not some magic thing that everyone should be doing that will give 100% cell coverage.

It's a two way radio. The transmitter needs to talk to the phone. But the phone also needs to talk back.

Also carriers have different frequency spectrums allocated to them.

A carrier using 900MHz has to have fewer base stations than one operating using 1800MHz because lower frequencies transmit further.

They also are able to go underground and through walls better.

[Frqy3]

It's a solved issue, in that the cell company "simply" has to spend enough on infrastructure to cover the desired area.

Justifying the business case to cover the low value (i.e. few customers) areas is another story. However, even here, it might be possible to justify it if the rest of the customer base sufficiently values wide coverage to pay a premium. Particularly if the competitors don't have the same level of coverage.