Prior to vesting out, I was the 9-1-1 coordinator for a diversely populated county win the Midwest. That's a euphemism for "sprawl" with encroachment on rural areas. Being the 9-1-1 coordinator was especially relevant for cellular, because I was the recipient of non-disclosure information concerning site placement, sectors, and various characteristics the carriers regard as proprietary and more or less trade secret. Given that they are generally market-based, there is no site-based license on file that one can reference, like public safety or business. So, I got to see the breadth of carriers - A and B band 800, the 800 MHz ESMR that pretended to be a cellular carrier, a bunch of PCS carriers, start-up AWS carriers, etc. Each of these had different spectrum and modulation techniques, so their characteristics were different.
The more important part, though, was learning the philosophy of some carriers. For example, one particular carrier emphasized coverage of the Interstates. A 2 mile excursion in either direction got you zero bars of coverage. Another carrier put up very high sites in rural areas that had little capacity. More than one discussion with cellular representatives had a "cow phone" joke embedded within them. A smaller carrier decided to high sites up about every 10 miles or so, with one about 2 miles away from where I lived. For the longest time, it was the only carrier that worked out by me, but it was a GSM carrier that offered very slow data services. But they seemed to make the biggest commitment throughout the region.
My take is that, to the marketing people, everything is the same beneath the flim-flam of plans (my first plan negotiation played like I felt someone was perpetrating a fraud against me). It's not. It's vastly different. Even with "good" coverage and capacity, what's the carrier's plan for continuity of operation? Network surveillance? Let's say, for instance, there's a widespread outage. They have a COW or satellite truck (the one that goes to the big chiefs' conferences and has amber whacker lights all over it and the half-dozen neatly groomed field-deployable twenty-somethings wearing navy blue polo shirts and tan 5-11 pants). Your outage is over 1,500 square miles with 65 sites gone dark. Who gets the truck? Is that the area where you've lost other modes of communication, or where their revenue plots show the greatest impact to their bottom-line (and what are they going to tell you when it trucks out to the moneymaker and your contingency plan has them in it)? Which sites have batteries vs. generator hookups? If a generator were to be hooked up, is there a box on a telephone pole somewhere that has a deep cycle battery running special equipment that happens to be the weakest link?
All the issues need to be considered. For what it's worth, I don't own a cellphone. I get one issued to me. The "great deal" is fine for 90% of the time, but the system chokes down and becomes unusable quickly. It was virtually useless when I made a recent trip back to my house in the Midwest. This was one of the carriers who wants the highway revenue, but can't care enough about "flyover" territory to invest in it - even minimally. Add to that, the poor quality audio that my already failing hearing strains to make out under ideal conditions, and I just could not care less who the glossy sheets say is "best."
The only best is the one that can provide the quality of service you need when you need it. No marketing person will ever tell you that directly.
