Verizon used to have resonable coverage here, but something changed in mid-August 2008 and now the Verizon coverage has almost disappeared.

On a good day, I may get 1 bar but nothing at my home in Grapeland, TX

Coverage around Grapeland and south acceptable (especially since they FINALLY got the Latexo tower online) but the roaming situation when going north is worthless. A few hundred yards past the county line you lose LOS to Verizon (Verizon's tower is pushing *extremely* low power to the north) The roaming partner is alltel, and Alltel fails miserably at coverage planning. Slocum has a tower, Palestine has a tower, and if you're in elkhart you've got no signal or 'ghost signal' that isn't going to hold a phone call. Alltel's serving tower is also about 50' too short to maintain LOS at the bottom of the valley about 1.5 miles north of Elkhart on US287. Short of an amplifier and external antenna you *will* lose calls. Very rarely actually get incoming calls while roaming on Alltel's system, but this doesn't appear to be Alltel's problem (I can call Alltel customers on the same towers, consistantly, without a problem). Also, there are no usable data modes when using Alltel's towers. The most high tech thing you can transfer is text messages, forget pictures, forget internet. Even 14.4k Q2N doesn't work in this area. Verizon's coverage map says if I pay Verizon $60 / month I *may* get the privledge of roaming on alltel's 1xRTT network (not the Alltel EVDO that *is* deployed in Palestine) but I might have to pay extra per kilobyte for it, but since its a roaming partner they can't guarantee performance. Whatever Verizon and Alltel's problem is, I'm seperating myself from it ASAP. Cingular's network doesn't throw a hissyfit when you hit the county line - it just does a simple GSM hard-handoff (200ms interruption) and keeps on talking.

We have always been pleased with our cell phone service through Cingular. Since service has been switched to AT&T half the time lately we have little or no service. When you call they either say nothing is wrong in this area or say they are working on a tower. There is a cell tower not 50 ft from our house and we still can't get any service. It is very frustrating. If they are closing this tower they just need to tell us that so we can make other plans for new cell phone service.

I live in Grapeland, Texas and get no reception until I get to Crockett going south or Palestine north. No bars at all.

Worked fine in Palestine, I get nothing in the Grapeland area.