My experience with AT&T has been quite different compared to what I generally see around the internet. I have a suspicion that it's all about location.
I'm in Pittsburgh, PA. AT&T service is absolutely fantastic out here. Yes, every month or so the data from one cell will cut out for a little while, but it's not a huge problem. About a year ago I was having problems making calls during peak times connected to a swamped base station. I submitted a report in the "Mark the Spot" application and about a week later everything was working normally, with a message sent to me in the app saying that they received my report and have added capacity at the effected tower site. I even saw the AT&T engineers up on top of the building that houses the base station working on it!
I'm from the Harrisburg, PA area where AT&T service is also very good. Since I'm a college kid, I'm constantly making the trip across the PA Turnpike between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh. Two years ago (good ol' Freshman year of college), a good 75% of the trip was limited to GSM/EDGE coverage for the 200 miles through the Allegheny Mountains. Now, there's only a small portion, I'd say about 10-15 miles, that falls back to GSM/EDGE. The rest is full HSPA+ UMTS. I saw an article on AT&T's corporate website somewhere stating that AT&T had invested something like $6 Billion in PA on their network, and my experience is some proof to that.
I've never had problems with coverage. There's some spots here and there where I'll get down to 1 or 2 bars, but they're few and far between. Signals are usually very strong and clean, which one might find unusual considering the rugged terrain of the Pittsburgh, PA area.
A huge perk to being an AT&T customer in Central and Western Pennsylvania is the simple fact that Verizon is MUCH more dominant in terms of user share. It would be a task to find someone on the street who has an AT&T cell phone. As a result, my data rates and call success rates are much higher than the national average for AT&T customers just because I'm competing with less users for access to the network. When it comes to Verizon, data rates are terrible in Pittsburgh. I've seen Verizon LTE speed tests average around 7-8mbps late in the evening, and this seems to be pretty widespread. CDMA? Forget about it. Think EDGE but just a *little* bit faster.
This is a classic example of how nationwide networks are so inefficient.
So... Does AT&T lie about their coverage? Well, yes and no. First, coverage maps are HIGHLY inaccurate. There's so many factors that play into received signal strength in addition to distance from the tower and terrain. These models are probably computer predictions based upon distance and terrain. They don't take into account any antenna gains on the user's side. Obviously, the signal will be stronger outside than it will be inside a building or home. IF AT&T does in fact use real physical measurements to generate these maps, remember guys, they're probably taking these measurements with a roof mounted, high gain antenna on a truck rolling down the street.
TL;DR - Just read it. It's a good post.
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