I was looking at others' reviews, but this area is a cell phone blackhole, dropping calls and barely resting at one bar at best. I have been in contact with T Mobile, who seem to be under the impression that there is "acceptable" reception in spite of the facts.

I do not get very good signal here.

No service at all in my apartment building. There are 5 floors and I live on the third. I have dropped calls constantly and call quality / reception is below poor. Think twice about Verizon. I think people go with them because of name recognition but the service truly is lousy.

Great coverage indoors too - no problems at all. Unfortunately I just cancelled insurance coverage on my Sprint phone and lost it - so now must deal with possibly switching carriers - as I prefer a prepaid plan.

better than it used to be - fewer dropped calls in the past several months

Since my November review, we have been told by a Cingular / AT&T customer service rep. that one of the towers in our area is "severely degraded". This is apparantly the reason for our extremely unreliable service. Since that time, it does not appear that any effort has been made to fix the tower. Our call reliability was once excellent but has continued to steadily worsen. Regardless of the number of bars we get (and it fluctuates widely - from 5 to 0, to 3, to 1... -- all within a period of a few minutes), the only constant is that almost every call drops the signal at some point, either on the caller or the receiver's end. In fact the conversations are exactly as depicted in the Cingular commercials! Extraordinarily frustrating! We have had enough and are actively seeking another service provider.

very poor reception in this area. will not work inside and sometimes not even outside.

I'm not sure why everyone else has been writing with 1s and 2s for reception for Verizon Wireless in the Silver Spring area. I suspect that it may have to do with inferior phone models. I have never had less than 4 bars anywhere in Silver Spring, even in the basement garage of my apartment building with a Motorola E815. Driving around the Washington Metro area, I never have less than 4 bars anywhere, even anywhere on the Beltway. Just my 2 cents.

Signal goes in and out, most calls are dropped. Bad reception. Even outside the apt, it is iffy.

I've lived in a top-floor and a bottom-floor apartment in this area. Reception on the top floor is perfect; on the bottom floor was marginal. On the bottom floor, and in the basement of my current apartment, calls would simply drop if I went into the hallway. I've never had a problem with reception outside, however.