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Your experience, while crummy and unacceptable, is very common at large arenas or gatherings with ATT.

Actually they just made a big deal about putting up a number of new repeaters at Coors Field here in Denver. They insalled what is supposed to be enough signal to cover a large city in order to allow people to access the network.

ATT is the achilles heel of the iPhone (Yeah I know you all know it already)
 
It's the TV trucks. They will block out all kinds of service if you're close enough to them. That's why those guys are always on 2 ways or something.
 
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