Very poor reception; almost unusable at home. Signal drops to zero or near zero so my batter will go from half to dead in a couple hours in the evening when I get home from work. Reception is terribly spotting on my commute to work. (60+ miles on 101 Freeway to Santa Barbara) There are about 20,000 commuters a day along that stretch of road, you would think they would put up more towers to accomodate. Dumping AT&T at the end of the contract.

I'm using a Nokia 1100 on a Tracfone which uses Cingular service network. Downtown (by the Town Center Mall it works 5 bars. I believe the cell phone tower is located at the Santa Maria Inn or the High Rise (at Broadway / Main) so service is great. Using the phone in the Orcutt area is poor coverage around the Y-Area (Hillview and Dahlia). All cell phone coverage use to be provided by towers on the Orcutt Hill. Now, one or more providers have hidden towers in the flag pole at Hertz Heavy Equipment Rental next to Broadway / Lakeview and Radisson Airport Hotel. I've used AT&T, Cingular, Verizon and Tracfone. AT&T use to be really good, then they stopped servicing their equipment before the Cingular buy out about 1-2 years ago. I (and 5 friends) went to Cingular about 4 years ago for cheaper service, worst service ever--get what you pay for... Only had 2 towers in Santa Maria / Orcutt area at the time. 1 tower was down for a week -- received no phone calls, no dialing out, voice mail notifications took 5+ hours to get... Paid $200 to leave them after this situation. Then I used Verizon Wireless which was very stable and had one of the best coverages. Still has dead areas, but for Santa Maria / Orcutt is probably the best. Then I decided to use Tracfone to keep costs down. Been very happy with the basic phone, costs are down because of all the extra minutes, fees, charges, etc. Cingular sent me a check for $169 for the early terminatation fees they charged some years ago... appears that they lost a lawsuit or the FCC made them pay back termination fees.

Left Verizon for a one year contract with T-mobile. Worst move ever made - lots of dropped calls, poor reception, call quality sucks. Will go back to Verizon when T-Mobile contract expires.

had great service on an older model Nokia when it was AT&T

Nextel, like all Cell companies in the area, have service to handle 101 not the city. Anything W of Suey Rd, is fringe, Although East seems ok. Otherwise, everything seems really good.