A Tip: Check Cell Phone Coverage Before you Buy

To those moving to Charlottesville from other areas, the ubiquity of cell phone coverage you may have experienced there might not be found here. The mobile providers and the County of Albemarle are working to get more towers, but these things take time.

Another tip: if you choose to live in an area that doesn’t have mobile service (or hard-wired internet or public water for that matter), that’s one of the beauties of living in a rural area. It’s rural.

I have had clients not purchase a home they liked because they couldn’t get service from their provider (I’m looking at you At & T). Check these things before you buy a home.

Looking through my search terms this morning, a visitor arrived looking for “when will us cellular get 4g in charlottesville va” leading to this musing from last year.

As a note: Verizon seems to have the best coverage around. I’ve heard good things about nTelos as well – basically GSM (AT&T, T-Mobile, etc) aren’t so great outside of the urban areas.

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3 Comments

  1. Jess Trynovich October 3, 2013 at 12:22

    i’m wondering if you have any updated thoughts on this? my husband and i just recently relocated to cvilld for his job and are having a rough time with verizon cell phone coverage. i

    Reply
    1. Jim Duncan October 3, 2013 at 15:10

      Jess –

      First, welcome to Charlottesville.

      Second, no not really. I still have Verizon and have been very happy with it except for the last month when it has been very inconsistent. I have clients and friends you have an tellers and they are happy with that as it uses the same network type as Verizon.

      This site/app is pretty useful too –

      http://opensignal.com/

      Reply
      1. Jess Trynovich October 3, 2013 at 15:59

        Thanks for the welcome and for your quick reply!

        Verizon tells us this is a known issue and we are welcome to either purchase a booster to help with service at home or get out of our contract for free. Thanks for the site reference. My husband is a territory sales manager for the northwestern corner of VA so this is helpful for figuring out the best option for his area as well as our apartment.

        Reply

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