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The following is based on a stay of a bit over a week. Voice coverage throughout the South Rim area is generally spotty at 1-2 bars, but is good enough to make reliable calls in many places. Specifically in Trailer Village I usually only had 1 bar of "1X" coverage, but only dropped a call once in several hours of calls. Some areas (specifically around The Village and lodge area) have more bars. For me the good news was that 3G coverage was quite good in Trailer Village. I connected with an average of 3 out of 4 bars on my MiFi hot spot, giving us reliable internet access. I saw download speeds up to 2Mbps, and we downloaded 1GB or so data over a week. So I would expect smart phone users to have decent data coverage in the area (unlike AT&T, who has no 3G coverage, and even their "E" coverage is poor).

Using my Verzion Wireless Blackberry around the lodge, village and canyon rim area, good phone coverage with some drop outs as you get further away from the village area. From the Yavapai West Lodge 2nd floor, get up to 1,200 kbps data coverage using the Blackberry in tether mode. My last trip here during the summer of 2007, had no Verizon Wireless in the entire park.

Verizon doesn't work too well around Grand Canyon National Park. When it does, many times it roams on Alltel's network. Flagstaff.

Frustrating... In a group of 4 of us, all with Verizon, I'm the only one that doesn't get reception at all. I tried my Motorola Q, and my Motorola V265. No service at all. 2 friends have LG phones that work fine and the other friend has a Razor that works fine.

Everyone in our large group, with a number of different phones, couldn't get any service at the Grand Canyon and around the hotels outside of the park. Most of us had Verizon as our carrier. We couldn't get reception until we were about a half an hour away from the park, then it was still only one bar. Forget placing a call anywhere north of Flagstaff.

Lots of A channel signal from Alltel, but the phone and / or the service (depending on how much credence should be given to the technician at the Verizon store in the Flagstaff Mall) is unable to roam off its native B channel to take advantage of it.