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inside and outside my house it's highly unreliable (both the number of bars and the quality that the bars represent), and very poor even at best -- scratchy sound quality, fading in and out, dropping calls, even not receiving calls. Awful. I have to use land line or drive somewhere out of the hills to make cell phone calls! My old dinosaur of a Nokia was better than the Samsung, but in this location, everything is bad.

Ridiculously terrible. Bars frequently read 4 or 5 but still drop 1 out of 3 calls, and I can't understand a word anybody says because of static, breaking up, and fuzz. Ick! Anybody have a better service in this area?

Reception is terrible no matter what kind of phone I use. No signal, low signal, dropped calls - you name it.

Verizon is pretty good almost anywhere else in the U.S. (I travel a lot), but it really sucks at home. Dropped calls are constant. I have to wander around my house every time I want to make a call in order to find a spot that gets even 1 bar. And, it keeps changing so I can never predict where the good reception will be. The local Verizon store a few blocks away has to use a special gadget / antenna just to boost their signal in order to get reception in their own store. Of course, part of the problem isn't Verizon -- they want to put up a few more cell towers to improve reception, but some Berkeley residents are afraid of being irradiated by cell phone towers. While there is no evidence for radiation danger from cell phone towers (at least on planet earth), the minority tyrannizes the rest of us who don't wear aluminum foil suits to protect us from those evil cell phone towers. Oh, please!

Almost always have 5 bars. In foggy weather, sometimes reception does go down to 1-2 bars but I've generally been happy with the quality of reception of infrequency of dropped calls.

The signal quality is notorious along this stretch when driving through the UC campus. Cuts out competely, particularly along Piedmont in the heart of campus but strength returns on either the north or south side when leaving. If people didn't whine so much about roof installation of cell antennas in Berkeley, perhaps we could also have consistent signals for emergency calls.

Just switched from Verizon to AT&T do to poor reception last month and needless to say it has bars every where I go to around here in the downtown berkeley area. Up and down university, telgraph even side streets in parts of North Berkeley by the BART it works at. Way to go AT&T.

I've been using Metro PCS with a RAZR V3 all around berkeley for almost a year now and I've been very happy with the coverage around here. There is no need for a landline in my room because the reception here is almost always good. Every once in a while I'll miss a call from bad reception, but in general it works great outside and solid inside.

it takes a really long time for my virginmobile cell phone to connect a call

I never have a problem with my reception anywhere from Ward St. to Montclair, although I have to admit that I rarely have phone calls that last longer than 2 or 3 minutes.