Coverage comments are submitted voluntarily by visitors around the New York, NY area.
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"Can you hear me now?"... HUH? "Can you hear me now?"... click! Phones near Penn Station show perfect signal strength with full bars, but Verizon drops calls consistently after a few seconds. Same (worse) with a Samsung SCH-a310, Motorola V60, etc. It's not the phones, it's the Verizon network. The signal falls to one bar at random. It seems Verizon's antenna nearby does not have anywhere near enough circuits to handle the volume near Penn Station, hence strong signals and dropped calls. The commercials are 100% on target, all you can ever say on a Verizon phone around here is, "Can you hear me now?"
Since AT&T switched to the Cingular network in Manhattan (or so says my handset), service / reception has plummeted. I'm often asked to "switch to a landline" whereas I never was in the past. Choppy conversations are frequent throughout Manhattan, and the Flatiron area is sure bet for dropped calls. If plans are still competitive, I'll likely switch to T-Mobile. (I've heard very good things from friends in Manhattan and beyond.)
My AT&T Samsung 426 has worked well 95 percent of the time in the LES and at my job downtown. Rarely a dropped call, sometimes I miss a word or two. Normally though it's pefect. always rings even in my building.
Reception in my apartment is awful. The phone shows 3-4 reception bars and sometimes still my caller can't hear me. When I am completely still the reception changes from 4 bars to "out of service," as if the cell tower were being driven around the block in the back of a truck or something - I can think of no other explanation for this weirdness. I complained to T-Mobile numerous times and they don't seem to care - once the operator suggested turning the phone on and off daily to "re-establish the connection" to the tower. I verbally doubted the science behind that suggestion - and it didn't work anyway. Icing on the cake? I just got a postcard from T-Mobile braying about better reception in Northern Manhattan. I haven't seen it yet. I might suck up the "breach of contract" fee just so I no longer have to pay these people for a service I can't often use, esp since we can bring our numbers to other carriers.
I've used three phones to date in this area: a Nokia (3 bars), a Treo 600 (2 bars), and now a Motorola 551 (4 bars). Since switching to the Motorola I've had no dropped calls, no static, and clear reception. A LOT of the problems on AT&T / Cingular's GSM network has to do with the phone you have and location; I get horrible reception in Astoria, Queens but great reception in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Even outdoors with a clear sky and a fully charged phone, I got static and dropped calls. This happens everywhere in the city. I also think it was the fact that they gave me a bottom of the line phone. It was so cheap it felt like a toy. They also charge you for other things that most cell phone services include as a part of the plan. I think that ATT is the worst of the cell phone companies. Maybe now that they've merged with Cingular they'll get better.
I've had T-Mobile since they were Omnipoint and then Voicestream and have been mostly satisfied with the service. Only thing is that they still don't have coverage in a lot of places. I took my cell phone on vacation to VA in 2001 and discovered to my dismay that it was useless; they had no service there. Then I went to CA this past Dec and found out that even though TMobile had service out west, that I was roaming on Cingular's network, so I couldn't take full advantage of my minutes. I would recommend TMobile, but they need to expand their service so they can truly be a national plan. They also need a wider selection of phones and a better upgrade plan.
