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.

Been with Sprint for 5 years -- never experience dropped calls. Reception is so-so in some areas but I can always get through. Phone has terrible sound -- used to think it was the reception but come to find out, it's my phone. I wish you test out phone sound before you buy.

I am a former AT&T customer who was switched to Cingular when the companies joined. Previously, I was very happy with reception in and around my house and around the area (4 or 5 bars almost all the time - even walking along the edge of Rock Creek Park) -- until Cingular began its "fewest dropped calls" ad. Ever since then, we've had very frequent dropped calls and MANY one-way calls (where EITHER we can hear the caller OR the caller can hear us!) Don't know what the problem is, but we are becoming very frustrated. Perhaps a tower has been removed.

I am using Sprint phone for the last 4 years and live by Leasure World. Very sad when a company promises to put tower and never does. Reception is always poor.

We moved into Leisure World with Sprint service and found we generally have 1 bar of reception. My plan is old, phone broke, so we went to Simply Wireless in Wheaton Plaza and they helped us locate a provider with better reception from our home, which is where we mostly use the phone. Despite the coverage map we were shown, T-Mobile has fully 5 bars in our location. Great!

Just switched from my AT&T phone to Cingular, which they promised would improve reception and call quality. Nope--there are still nany dead spots in my house; I often can hear the caller, but they can't hear me. Going into the front yard is my only option--the backyard reception is awful too.