Coverage Getting Worse

Hi there! @rscrocker Thanks for posting your concerns. Looking at those areas, we do have locations in and around them that may have limited service available.

While AT&T is licensed to cover a particular area, there may be spots within that area that have little or no coverage.

There are several reasons why coverage may not exist in a given area:

Zoning laws restricting towers

Issues where the surrounding terrain does not make a tower feasible

Not enough traffic in that area to support the cost of a tower

When deciding where to place a tower, it is imperative that the maximum number of possible customers are affected to keep our cost of service low.

One thing I’d recommend you try, is reporting low coverage areas with the AT&T Mark the Spot app.

Mark the Spot is a quick and easy to use app enabling you to provide network user experiences from your smartphone directly to AT&T. We use the issues you report to optimize and enhance our network to provide you with a great 4G network experience.

For more information on the app and steps to get it on your smartphone, please visit us at http://www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=KB111577&cv=820

We also have the AT&T Microcell available that will help alleviate that low signal in the home.

For more information and availability please go to www.att.com/att/microcell/

Hope this helps!

Charise

You are correct rscrocker! AT&T coverage has been steadily declining since 2009, and sharply declining in 2015-2016.
T-mobile customers have noticed the same thing because T-mobile and AT&T use the same towers.

However, it is being done deliberately to force people to buy new phones over and over, after they break them in frustration. I learned this from a former AT&T employee. Might sound like a joke, but it's not. By 2016, we would expect to have fully reliable, clear phone service everywhere, but we actually have nothing remotely close to that.

Most of us remember that phone reception used to work circa 2001-2009 just fine, for the most part.

Currently 50% of people in Madison do not have what would qualify as phone service. This is because AT&T and T-mobile dominate the market here.

Having no phone service leads to massive disadvantages such as missed appointments, unemployment and even death.

[Per Guidelines:  Keep it Relevant and Appropriate].. They are also defrauding entire other industries who depend on customers having phone service. 

In Sonora, CA zip 95370 I have noticed a SIGNIFICANT reduction in signal strength. I love how the official AT&T reply failed to address the DECREASE in signal strength and instead just mention how some areas will have low service. Yep, we know that there are dead pockets, thanks for nothing. What we WANT TO KNOW is why areas where we have had 4-5 bars all of the sudden have 1-2 bars.

So AT&T rep, why don't you answer the question that was asked instead of giving a irrelevant standard response that does not apply to the issue.

At least in Texas, this is part of the problem: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas-politics/2017/05/18/bill-improve-cellphone-service-texas-cost-cities-millions-officials-say

Dial down the power, make it a misery to use the very thing you can't seem to live without these days and see what we all start screaming about. The bill will make it so we pay more property taxes or local sales taxes to make up for the shortfalls in local budgets caused by the companies, we already pay handsomely to provide us with a service that use to work just fine, needing a "break" in the fees that they pay. Translation: they pay less to offer us a service that we still pay the same or more for, while we end up paying more elsewhere (in taxes) in addition. However, if they don't get this break in cost, it sounds as if we'll have poor and worse cell coverage forever.

In 14 years of owning my house I've gone from 5 bars and $850/yr in property taxes, to having to use Apple Network wifi to make calls at home because I get one or less bars and paying $1700/yr in taxes. 100% change in both taxes (up) and coverage (down). 

Somewhere we the consumers are going to end up paying either way, in loss of revenue or as someone earlier pointed out, perhaps in loss of life or property - or - more taxes. What is the answer?