All Mobile Phone Carriers Should Provide Maps Like This

T-Mobile has a wonderful street-level mapping tool that will show you exactly where you will have good coverage and where you won’t. They call it a “Personal Coverage Check.”
And sure enough, they show the area around my house as “bad coverage.” Surprised my T-Mobile phone actually worked here at all, quite honestly.

Other carriers have these tools, but they do not give the public access to them. Cingular will show you if you go into a store and ask, but I’d much rather have it available on the website. If you call Cingular, they will give you a general idea of coverage at your location as well. What they told me was that they had to zoom out about 10 miles from my location to find towers. Surprisingly, my service works fairly well most of the time despite this.

In any case, every mobile phone carrier should be required to provide these kinds of maps to their customers. It would certainly do a lot to reduce the dreaded churn all carriers face.