Cellular Coverage in Lyons Colorado

When the iPhone was being announced at the Keynote presentation in January 2007, the first thing I did was call the local Apple store and ask to get on the list. What a fan-boy. The second thing I did was take a look at AT&T's coverage viewer. Wireless coverage has been horrible in Lyons. It's a bit of a valley surrounded by mountains in the foothills of the Rockies. To the right is a screenshot I saved from back in 2007. As you can see the cream color is "no service". That orange color is "moderate coverage" and there wasn't much of it.

Then the 3G iPhone was released. A few friends with 1st generation iPhones came by around that time and showed me five bars in every room of my house! A quick look at the latest AT&T coverage viewer showed me then what I still see today. Most of Lyons now covered by "good" coverage. No 3G service in town, but "good" EDGE was enough to sell me on finally getting a few iPhones. but they worked great. 3G service was available in Boulder and around town I could hook into WiFi.


And then, New Years Eve 2008 happened. The signal on my phone dropped to zero. This went on for a couple of days. Honestly, I figured it was some sort of silly Y2K9 issue. Service eventually came back around January 4th, 2009. Even so it was pretty strange to see service drop from five bars to zero and stay there for days on end.

The problem is this has been going on every few weeks. I talk to customer support and technical support at AT&T so often I'd like to think I can now put myself in a Zen like state and find my happy place. Every time it's the same routine. Do I have permission to access your account today Sir, can I get your address, will you confirm your phone number, last four digits, what is the name on the account, what can I help you with today... and the ever brainfloss... please reset your phone. As if -- I wouldn't have tried that a thousand times before blowing an hour here with you. There is nothing quite like having someone drag you though the customer support flow chart every couple weeks over and over. We pay about $180 a month for our two phones. This is $6 a day. I figure with 20 days of complete outage thus far, we're out $120.

Given a couple of tidbits from the AT&T folks, I confirmed some things and did little digging. AT&T will not give you the location the cell towers covering your area. Some kind of security risk? Yeah, right - you can get them anyway, there are on public record with the FCC. And with the magic of the modern internets you can find the information very easily. There is only one cell tower within 10 miles of my location! I don't know if I would have placed a $180/mo by two year bet ($4320) knowing that.

The first thing I did was pull up a satellite image of the tower from a year or so back. Notice it's in the middle of nowhere without any surrounding structures. It's the green roofed building there in the dirt.

The I drove by the location to check out what the latest was. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's going on here. Take a look at the massive multistory retirement homes being built between the tower and Lyons.

The antennas furthest down the tower are about even with the roof line of the new structure. That's certainly not a great scenario for radio propagation headed eight miles West and into the valley of Lyons. If you look really closely at the photo on the left you'll also see a crew that seems to be working on the tower itself. There is even someone bending pipe out front.

After I discovered this little gem, I made a call to the owner of the tower. Towers own land, and lease their space to cellular service companies like AT&T. This was one of the most interesting phone conversations I've ever had in my life. It's pretty clear the tower owners don't often get calls from end customers to hassle them about construction around the towers. A little tidbit I learned, Boulder County is no longer allowing new towers to be installed. So whatever coverage you have now, is what you'll be stuck with --- forever!