Can you hear me YET? Can you STILL hear me?

Verizon Wireless makes a big deal of their "Can You hear Me Now?" advertising slogan, using it to emphasize the fact that they have a reasonably decent cell phone coverage area in the US. What they don't say is that for a lot of folks (myself included), their calls often take an extra 4 to 6 seconds to actually connect after flipping the phone open (or mashing the appropriate button) on an incoming call. It's not an annoyance at the screaming-at-the-sales-rep level, but it's enough to make me think that maybe I should shop around when the current contract ends.

And when I'm on the road, I frequently find their service dropping the connection even when there is at least one apparent cell phone antenna tower in direct line-of-sight. Sometimes, it's pretty obvious that I've just crossed a tariff boundary, which probably makes handoff of the call from one local segment to the next a bit tricky; other times, the call just goes dead for no reason at all. I won't say that the frequency is noticeably worse than it was when I was with AT&T, but it definitely seems worse than it was prior to AT&T's reduction in the number of towers they kept in service after they borged the various companies that they ate on the way to reassembling themselves. (And who was the regulatory idiot that thought it was a good idea to let AT&T put itself back together, anyway? Hello? Monopolies are BAD! And now they're trying to quietly buy Sprint, which would cut the competition level for nationwide service that much more. This is NOT a good thing.)