Verizon Towers In Maine

[FVJ48]

Can anyone tell me if any new towers have recently been added or if any are scheduled to be added in the immediate future to cover the Gorham & Buxton Maine area?

[agentHibby]

I would not count on it any time soon. "but I could be wrong on this."
They do have a PCS license for most of the state. I don''t see Verizon building their until close to the 10 year deadlin,e and only doing it to complete buildout requirements so they don't lose their license.

[mortimer]

Last year Verizon purchased several PCS licenses from another company that will improve coverage generally in Maine (particularly the large hole on I95 from Scarborough to Kittery). As you may know, PCS licencses are for the 1900 mhz band, which generally has poorer propogation than the other 850mhz licenses that Verizon owns - that means it takes 2-3x the number of towers to cover the same geographic area. That leads me to believe Verizon will use these licenses to focus on improving the home network coverage in key well-trafficed areas, and makes it somewhat unattractive to use them to improve broad areas of rural coverage.

I talked to someone at Verizon last fall who indicated the network improvements using the PCS licenses for teh i95 corridor have been designed, and physical build-out should be expected this year. Normally I would be dubious, but my guess is that their incollect costs are pretty high on i95 with the heavy tourist traffic and this would be a reasonable priority for them. Also, since a couple other PCS carriers (sprint, t-mobile) are already deployed in this same area, the tower footprint probably already exists which makes things a lot faster.

That doesn't answer your question exactly about Buxton, but my guess is that it would be included in the same buildout.