VZW Coverage Report: West Central Vermont

(cross-posted from another thread at HoFo)

Now, I can't say I'm an expert, but I'm just back from a weekend in Vermont, so consider this my coverage report.

South Burlington (that's actually a separate city from Burlington): Excellent. Calls go through every time and are crystal clear. This includes Burlington International Airport (BTV). No congestion problems despite heavy usage from people leaving from UVM's (University of Vermont) and Middlebury College's graduations (both on the same day!). No, I was not going to a graduation.

Williston: Excellent, like South Burlington.

Burlington: Not a whole lot of experience, just along Dorset Street and to the Wyndham (old Radisson). I did take note that my VX4400 showed 4 bars along side the Unicel store and 5-6 bars near the Verizon Wireless store.

Shelburne: Terrible coverage, even along Shelburne Road. My phone kept going in and out of VZW 1x and Unicel AMPS (Extended Network). I was sitting in the same place and my phone didn't stabilize.

Bristol: The entire village of Bristol had 1 bar of 1x coverage. The tower is well outside the village (but still in the town) and is along VT-116 I believe (check me if I'm wrong or if that makes no sense) headed north towards Williston/South Burlington. Calls won't be great, but it worked. Calls to *611 and #646 went through, but I decided to use AMPS on Unicel for the most part, forcing the phone to home on SID 313. Dialing *22803 allowed me to check SPCS's coverage, which I believe is a remnant of a signal out of Middlebury. I actually got hear "Welcome to PCS Customer Solutions! Briefly tell me how I can help you." despite having a -109 Rx Power signal. Ec/Io was good and I was placing the call at about midnight, both of which probably helped. Inside big buildings (well...inside the big building, which is the high school) my phone switched to Unicel automatically and often lost service. I saw a student texting in a school hallway though using an LG VX4400, so apparently you can get signal some places. VZW AMPS was better than VZW 1x, but Unicel AMPS was better than them all. Mobile Web worked well from inside the house I was staying in. Ask vermontcellboy; I PM'd him from my phone while there!

Middlebury: Little experience, but coverage was acceptable.

Along VT-2A: Coverage was acceptable, with a few places where the phone would switch to Unicel and a few places where the phone would go to Searching for Service.

Along I-89 between Burlington and Montpelier: Surprisingly mediocre. Usually, interstates have excellent coverage, but from US-2 off the interstate (I could still see I-89 from US-2) my phone dropped to Unicel.

Waterbury (the Ben and Jerry's factory location): Acceptable.


Overall: Coverage was acceptable most places. Unicel AMPS will let you place calls pretty much anywhere, so I strongly recommend a trimode.

My friend's family with whom I was staying had Unicel for their 2 cell phones and plans to port to Verizon as soon as their contracts run out. They live in Bristol, and I told them that my experience was that they would absolutely need a tri-mode, but that things should be good. Calls may actually sound better with 1 bar of 1x CDMA than 3 bars of TDMA, but that's personal opinion. She was also told that Unicel is actively tearing down their analog network, to which I said, "That's bull. The FCC won't let them until at least 2007."


And here's something unrelated but interesting:

According to a report (this portion on a survey) published by the Vermont Department of Public Service at http://www.thinkvermont.com (I've been reading the report for the past half hour or so - I'm a telegeek ), of Vermonters with wireless telephone service, 41.0% of residential customers and 49.2% of non-residential customers use Unicel and 31.7% of residential customers and 38.4% of non-residential customers use Verizon Wireless. 1.6% of residential customers miraculously claim that they use something other than VZW, Unicel, USCC, Nextel, SPCS, AT&T, and TracFone. However, less than half of Vermonters use a wireless service, and none surveyed rated wireless service in Vermont as "excellent;" most gave it "fair" or "poor" marks. People think that it needs to be better and are split pretty evenly between wanting lots of short towers and fewer tall towers, while some want no more towers but better service (hmm...sounds like a typical NIMBYite!).

The report is here: http://www.thinkvermont.com/telecom...tions/index.cfm
Pick a PDF or ZIP file near the top.

 

I found a VZW tower along VT-116 just a few minutes outside Bristol village. It fluctuated 1 or 2 bars in the village. When I pointed the tower out, a person who knows the area well (she's lived there for 20+ years) said it was the VZW tower and also a number of television stations come in off the tower.
SPCS coverage was terrible (-109 Rx Power is borderline unusable). It was always 1 bar. If it helps, these readings were taken from rather along Main St., between Mountain St. and the only traffic light in town, so I was near the center of town. I assumed that the signal was coming from over in Middlebury.
I drove down VT-17 to New Haven and I can see where Unicel could stick a silo site...it's all farms down that way. Still, with a tower in close proximity to Mt. Abraham, I'm surprised that Unicel coverage was so miserable inside the building.

Do you live in Bristol? Or somewhere nearby?

 

Have fun! It's beautiful, but if I hadn't been hanging out with a friend, I would have been bored out of my mind!

 

Does this help: http://www.thinkvermont.com/telecommunications/index.cfm

It seems something broke my link in the original post. It should be this one, but the actual link got clipped, not just the text of the link.