Lake Powell Coverage Report

We had one Verizon phone, two U.S. Cellular phones and about a dozen Cingular phones on our trip as well as one T-Mobile. Here's the report:

Cingular GSM service performs quite well on native Cingular until past Beaver where we took U.S. 20 to U.S. 89. As soon as you leave I-15 your Cingular services goes bye-bye and stays that way until a little after you start going south on U.S. 89 towards Panguitch when it picks up the ALLTEL GSM roamer network. Coverage through Panguitch was fine. There were some holes going down towards Kanab, some holes were large, others were small. ALLTEL has GSM service in small towns like Mt. Carmel/Mt. Carmel Junction which is amazing. Then there is no service from outside of Kanab until you hit the Lake Powell area just outside of Page, AZ where it picks up ALLTEL out of their Page tower. ALLTEL GSM service at Wahweap is good on hills, but poor/unavailable the further you go down towards the docks and at the docks the phones often displayed no service. On the lake itself ALLTEL GSM left a lot to be desired. The people ended up using my VZW phone or the two U.S. Cellular phones.
ALLTEL's only GSM towers that reach the area seem to be out of Page. Their Navajo Mountain cellsite has no GSM, nor CDMA on it for that matter.

I often forced my phone onto ALLTEL CDMA to compare it to my native Verizon service and it performed much more poor at the lake than my Verizon service. The only CDMA signal also comes out of Page. Their coverage along I-15 down past Beaver was fine and picked up coming down the mountain just before the U.S. 20/89 merge. The only stretch I found with ALLTEL CDMA but not Verizon was through the small communities of Mt. Carmel Junction area.

Verizon performed best by far. As I stated before, their rural I-15 coverage does seem to be covered cheaply with few towers somewhere high up on mountain tops. Their new Beaver cellsite gave me full service even indoors and Verizon natively covers nearly every small community ALLTEL did other than the ones mentioned. Verizon has more cellsites(or maybe more CDMA cellsites) around Lake Powell than ALLTEL. They have one cellsite in Page that I know of broadcasting SID 1026. One Verizon site is on top of Navajo Mountain and one is outside of Big Water, UT right at the AZ/UT border on a mountain top. Those three sites give you awesome coverage in all areas I went to as far up as the Natural Rainbow Bridge. The only area Verizon even failed me was Navajo Canyon. Verizon coverage at Wahweap was excellent and my phone was being used while we were there as well as on many areas along the lake. One rather strange thing, though, was that Verizon's cellsite at Navajo Mountain and the one outside of Big Water were broadcasting on Channel 777. I've never seen my phone camp on or utilize that channel before...does anyone know why Verizon would chose to have those sites broadcast that channel??? As soon as you hit the Kanab cellsite or any other cellsite along the way it camps out on Channel 384 again.

The U.S. Cellular phones acted exactly was my Verizon phone. They roamed on the VZW network but were AMPS capable so in fringe areas wehre my phone grabbed 1 bar of digital and took 20 seconds to connect, the U.S. Cellular phones switched to Analog and worked fine.

Overall I was quite surprised at how well my service worked, not only considering the rural area I was in, but also the terrain. It was very hot and I'm glad to be home again.

 

The only GSM signal available surrounding the Lake Powell/Page area is the ALLTEL GSM roamer network and both Cingular and T-Mobile were able to roam on it.

Lake Powell was a blast. We had a houseboat, a speedboat as well as a couple of jetskies. The topography and landscape of the lake and the surrounding area just fascinated me.

 

So do you think that Verizon will one day invest in those areas? There are way too many small coverage holes along that corridor and if one travels that route a lot your calls would drop left and right.

 

I think so. Isn't the hill like southeast of town with two towers on it...east of I-15???

 

Whatever they do, hopefully they will do something soon. Many people that travel that route have Verizon service and get their calls dropped all the time.

 

That's what I thought. Where before I had 3 bars I now have full service in parts of town. At least they did some improvement in the rural area.

 

ALLTEL surely does a super job here in UT covering their license area. Have you ever taken UT-20 from I-15 to UT-89 down to Panguitch area??? If so, how did you think coverage was??? There was no digital coverage until just before you hit U.S. 89 and then there were more dead spots and huge dead spots from Kanab to Lake Powell. I'm just wondering how well a phone with AmPS backup would have worked.
I was a little surprised at ALLTEL's lack of digital CDMA and GSM coverage at the lake itself. Their only CDMA/GSM site was out of Page, AZ at the Wahweap marina itself there were places with no service. On the lake itself their GSM/CDMA coverage left a lot to be desired.

 

IN Beaver??? I'm sure Sprint works in Beaver but their coverage is solely along I-15 and they have no off-interstate coverage whatsoever unlike Verizon and ALLTEL.

 

Mike, thanks for posting your findings...they almost go hand in hand to mine.
I saw at least one site between Page/Lake Powell and Kanab and I saw a person using a big brick phone(which I assume is AMPS) while in a traffic jam on that stretch of road...I believe ALLTEL has a site there that has just not been upraded to CDMA/GSM.