[thinkxingu]

Originally Posted by bobkatfly

Agree. I'm in Tuftonboro about 150 ft above lake level and have a direct line of sight to the tower near Gunstock. Starting in the summer of 2019 I had decent service until around 7 or 8 AM. After that, service slowly started degrading (people waking up on the more densely populated side of the lake, businesses opening, etc.). In the summer it was much worse and holidays like the 4th, forget about it. Finally installed a cell booster which helped....a little.

So, the booster and deprioritization would be different. A booster would help if signal strength was low whereas deprioritization is when certain users have less, or slower, access to the network.

A few years back, I'd posted a bunch about this when our prepaid Verizon service essentially stopped working for that summer and I spent hours working with their techs to find the "problem" when they could've just told me it's because I had the lowest tiered service and, when the network was congested, I'd be last to be given access (this page seems to have the best information with regards to the hierarchical order of priority: https://coveragecritic.com/mobile-ph...prioritization). (Of course they don't want to be honest and say, "our prepaid network blows in busy areas.")

Anyhow, I'd researched and discovered that AT&T's network is usually less congested because they have fewer overall users and their first responder bandwidth is shared with consumers when not being used. For two summers, we had great AT&T prepaid for, like, $97 for three phones with plenty of data (15GB w/rollover or something).

This past fall, my wife's school started using texting to communicate more often to deal with staffing shortages, absences, etc. and AT&T just wasn't working, so we switched over to Verizon again (her colleagues were having good luck with Verizon, otherwise we would've tried T-Mobile first).

When signing up for Verizon, we chose one of the unlimited plans which now comes with Hulu and Disney, so, even though we pay $130/mth. for three phones unlimited, we get a $15 value out of those for a net increase of $18.

We've not really noticed much difference in coverage, but Verizon is certainly faster when signal is strong.

Finally, since we got them towards the end of the season, I have no idea if having the "premium" tier plan will avoid the problems we had during peak times a few summers ago. I do know that I'll have to install a signal booster as the metal roof of my porch and camp crush the signal strength.

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