VZ's towers will not help at&t coverage, however, verizon is getting these towers mostly through the acquisition of Rural Cellular, and part of that deal At&t gets also spectrum, network asset and also some of the subscribers for the lake placid, plattsburgh areas, as well as adirondack areas, so At&t's coverage WILL improve, mostly likely not till 3/4Q '08 however, as the deal is slotted not to go through till 2Q '08....can't find the link siting some of this info, but I did actually talk to the network engineer in charge of all this stuff

I hate that I am so clueless about this, but I am not understanding how ATT coverage will eventually improve, if the VZ towers will not help ATT coverage? My ATT service in the capital region of NY is superb, but we travel up north frequently in the summer (to visit the lakes in the beautiful Adirondacks) and it would be nice if ATT customers received benefit of new cell towers in that area.

It was such a big deal that the guy died up there last year - he would have lived (after crashing his car) if his wife's cell phone would have worked. That was a huge incentive for getting towers put up there. Therefore, they should make some sort of a deal (in my humble opinion) that ALL of the networks can utilize the towers. It was so hard to...
(continues)

How big of an area is Adirondacks? It's unfortunate that someone died but you can't place the blame on cell phone companies. Is it a region worth covering? They're to put up a multi million dollar tower to service how many customers? From what I can tell it's a big mountain region, it's hard to cover those.

Furthermore we can't share Verizons towers because of the different technologies. We run GSM, they run CDMA. The two are not compatible.

No, they didn't place blame on the cell phone companies, but people had been trying to get cell service up there and so they used that poor man's death as incentive to push harder for it, and it looks like the tactic worked.

I think there are quite a few people living there, of course it's not like the city or the suburbs, but I am sure there are enough people living there to make it worth the cell phone companies while to install them. Obviously so, or people wouldn't have fought so hard for so many years to get them up. The issue has always been more that the Adirondacks are so beautiful to look at, that conservationists (is that the right word?) didn't want "non-natural" towers installed. They felt it would take away from the beau...
(continues)