Dennis Ferguson wrote:

> have a friend who lives in La Honda who was an AT&T customer for
> a long time, and who now has Sprint service for the above reason. If there
> are people in the Santa Cruz mountains who prefer Verizon they must
> live further south, closer to Highway 9, where Verizon does have coverage.

My experience is all with AC1. I do a lot of cycling and hiking
throughout the Santa Cruz mountains, and the southern part of San Mateo
county. In many of these areas I get only AMPS coverage. I have no
handset with AC2, so I can't comment on AC2 coverage. I presume that its
Verizon AMPS and not AT&T AMPS since I've never been charged roaming,
and because I know that Verizon AMPS is used on most of the roadside
call boxes on the roads that have call boxes.

What you have to realize about coverage maps is that if the tower has
both digital and AMPS, then they will show that area as digital. However
you'll get AMPS service for a much longer distance away from the tower
than you'll get CDMA service (or GSM service for that matter).

My wife's company had been using Nextel, which was an extremely foolish
thing to do because they send their field people out to every niche and
corner of the Bay Area (though not Santa Cruz county). In fact the
nature of the business is that the rural residents are more likely to
use the service than the urban residents that could more easily come in
for service. So all the field people had to have a personal phone that
had AMPS service for the areas with no Nextel service. Sometimes the
call they needed to make was as mundane as calling the homeowner to tell
them to come out and restrain their dogs so the field person could get
out of the car! They're now switching to Verizon with the V325i,
partially for AMPS, and partially for the GPS capability, neither of
which is available on Cingular or Nextel.