I'm wondering who actually sells service in Rapid City. I know that Alltel and Verizon claim native coverage, but the ULS is not particularly helpful in knowing who actually offers service there. AT&T, Sprint, as well as T-Mobile appear to have licenses, but don't offer service there. Surely it can't be a two-horse area, is it? Anyone from RC have any info? Thanks in advance!
It looks like Alltel & Verizon are the only ones to provide service within the area. This is a former Western Wireless area, so Alltel provides GSM roaming & CDMA. AT&T & T-Mobile both roam on Alltel here. Sprint roams on either Alltel or VzW. So, yea, it looks like a two horse area, with Alltel providing most of the roaming for other carriers.
Wow, that is really sad. Each area has the potential for nine carriers (not counting AWS). Why can an area with all licenses being licensed only actually have two serving carriers? Irregardless, Alltel would have been my choice by default unless there was a local outfit that could do it better, so I guess I'm safe. Moving there soon, so I wanted to know. Thanks. If anyone has any experience with the two there, I'd be interested. I'm sure Alltel does it best like they usually do when put up against VZW Cellular to Cellular license.
This is not a slam on the Rapid City area, but the other carriers probably don't have plans to build out a network due to lack of revenue potential. AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile are trying to get the most bang for their buck in large metro areas and are spending dollars on 3G upgrades (ie. UMTS, WiMax, etc...). Thats not to say they won't someday install a native network in the area, just right now they irons in the fire elsewhere. These other carriers would rather engage in reasonable roaming agreements with Alltel to get both CDMA & GSM coverage for their customers when they are in that part of the country.
What's weirdest about the area is not the lack of national carriers, but rather the lack of any local carrier. Colorado has Union and Viaero, Nebraska has Indigo and Viaero, Iowa has Long Lines, Wyoming has Union, all covering smaller population bases. Apparently the bigger carriers take all the spectrum so that no one local can start, but don't use it. I just don't understand how build out requirements can really be so lax that with 9 licenses in the area, there are only two operating carriers. I could see four or five, but there is something seriously wrong when you end up with two. I really thought the FCC had provisions to stop exactly this from happening. EDIT: But, I do agree with what you're saying. There probably isn't much possibility for growth in that area, and with Alltel providing both CDMA and GSM, there really is no need for the other big three to try.
The FCC is a farce in regards to what they force carriers to provide when they own licenses. I think all AT&T or any other carrier would have to do is stick a transmitting omni antenna on a tower up as its "license saver" for that particular area and call it good.....meeting FCC requirements. You would think these other carriers would be required to eventually build some sort of network out?
I too have been disappointed for quite some time about just how poor the options are in Rapid City, considering its population and the amount of tourist traffic the area gets. Qwest wireless had a pretty good buildout (though almost exclusively within the city limits), and I was hoping Sprint would take this when they bought Qwest's network assets, but no luck there. From personal experience, neither VZW nor Alltel are that great in some parts of RC, and especially through much of the Black Hills, though they have both recently improved very slightly. Personally, I'd probably go with Alltel if I lived there. It's a shame, because Viaero could do an excellent job building that area out with usable GSM if they could just pry a license away from somebody. One of the disadvantages of using Viaero, for those living in northern Nebraska, is that the GSM coverage pretty much ends at the South Dakota border as the Alltel roamer GSM coverage, I've heard, is extremely unreliable.
