Thought that when Nextel hooked up with Sprint and now Embarq, things would get better. Nextel is very poor downeast from Beaufort. Not bad on the water, but on land is useless. Either no bars or dropped calls.

Since Alltel has put a tower in the Straits area, the coverage has improved 100x. Used to when I would go to use my phone it would have 1 bar Digital or 2 Analog and the call, if it would even go through, would drop out during the call. Now I hardly ever have dropped calls. On a side note Cingular has either put a tower on Harkers Island (noticed cells on the water tower) or in Otway down Amos Gillikin Road. My sister has them and never had service past Beaufort. Now she has full bars from Otway to Morehead City. Also I noticed that on the tower in Otway there are two sets of cells on it, and it is rumored that Verizon was putting service around this area. But you know how rumors are! =) (Haven't been able to test Sprint / Nextel, T Mobile, or Verizon) US Cellular coverage around here still is pretty crappy!