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The Lake Zumbro area is notable for having poor cell phone reception, from any carrier. Daughter has Sprint, Wife has AT&T, I have Verizon, and nothing works at home on Postier's Point, and most of the lake surface, while boating. If anybody knows of a good carrier and phone combination that works out here, I would appreciate hearing about it.

No GSM reception, No TDMA / Analog reception ( I have several Cingular phones) either on the lake, or shoreline residences. Daughter has a Sprint Samsung 400 phone, with no reception at our residence on the lake shore, or on the lake itself. I have had utility guys out to the house with Midwest Wireless that seem to get a little better coverage. This is a shame, because there is a population of nearly 1K people along this lake, most of which have spotty reception if any. I also have noticed that areas on county 12 between Oronoco and the lake that were in my home TDMA area now are roaming (at $1 per minute on my plan)! That change happened last year, just before the new tower north of Oronoco went up.

I got Virgin Mobile's pay as you go thing for Xmas as a present. It's my first cell phone and the Kyocera K9 does ok. Virgin Mobile seems to do well to for the Rochester and Oronoco area. Although, I have no clue what towers they use. I'm usually at 2 bars and once in a while at full, seems to be pretty much random but has no impact on reception. However, battery life can fluctuate from a week to less than a day depending on how much juice the phone needs to stay connected, again seems almost random. I've had no missed call, dropped calls, or bad reception even going from Oronoco through Rochester up through Minneapolis and over to St. Paul. I can't complain short of their phone selection. I don't know if you can beat their cheap service as long as you don't use the phone a lot. I am in the market for a new(good) phone and do require a new service provider to do so. Virgin Mobile only works with "their" phones, and they have nothing I want. Midwest Wireless is basically the best here, my brother has it, and it works up to the cities without roaming if you can force analog and turn off roaming. He has a LG4400 though, a very good reception phone. He's had no problems up to the Twin Cities down to Iowa. I'm looking at a good camera phone, and I don't yet know what I can get with Midwest Wireless or if they'll work with all phones unlike Virgin Mobile. AT&T is ok at best. My parents had it and my brother started on it before switching to Midwest Wireless. It is somewhat phone dependent, but they just can't match Midwest Wireless for the Rochester area. It's kind of odd how much companies vary when a lot of them share the same towers...