Big areas without sufficient customer numbers.  Expect them to ditch AMPS,
and soon.

Good point, Todd. I never thought of it that way as far as "The Network".

I gave up my last tri-mode for my "upgrade" from my e815 to a v3m. Hate to
admit it, but I haven't missed AMPS in a year.

That said, I haven't traveled rurally to any extent this past year either.

I would certainly hope VZW saw the mistake T-Mo made at the beginning, where
their coverage was OK in the metro areas, but not in the fringes, where
untold millions of us live. The reputation as an "urban" provider crippled
them from the start. To this day, talk to anyone 50 miles from the nearest
big city, you'll find few T-Mo customers, even with their jazzy
handsets.....

.....And let's face it, carryover minutes, even with their limitations,
would have been be a powerful draw for ATTWS/Cingular, if they had the
network to back it up. They stepped on their own feet with the "fewest
dropped calls" thing too....we all knew they were grasping at straws, and
you could only fool so many new customers into signing up, until they
started saying "fewest dropped calls, MY A$$".

From a purely selfish point of view, I'm 98%+ percent a voice caller, so
VZW's high charges for data and other features are actually a good
thing.....things like that piss off the data users, and keep them with other
carriers, thereby helping keep the market competitive and VZW on their toes.

Gotta look at the big picture.....

Dean

And even those carriers saw the light. I visit some friends in a rural
area and the roaming partner is a small local carrier. About 2 years ago
they added digital on their towers and then plopped in a bunch of sites
to fill things in. My digital only phone works fine there.

I don't know.  Verizon's own network is fine, but they've never been
shy about removing roaming coverage they don't like from their plans.

For my favorite example look at 94020 on the Verizon and Sprint
coverage maps.  There's AT&T AMPS(/TDMA?) towers in there which
Verizon was fine with removing from ACII even though they had
nothing of their own in there.  The friends I have who live in
94020 use Sprint to get coverage at home.

Speaking of that, this isn't the only place in the country where
I've noticed AT&T towers with no GSM.  I keep wondering whether
AT&T just has a really long ToDo list of things they want to get
to, or whether they've decided there are places where trying to
maintain coverage is bad for margins so they're waiting for the
chance to get rid of it altogether.

Dennis Ferguson

Legally, they're not supposed to turn it off unless digital is providing
coverage everywhere that AMPS was providing coverage, but I'm sure that
the carriers have no intention of following the FCC's rules.

Just out of curisoty, have you ever tried data on analog?  Tried it once
with an old orinoco data card when I was in AK.... a snail would have won
that race!

at any rate, seems data is sort of important to you, and wondered if there
was a secret way of doing data with analog? Come to think of it, don't
recall my sprint phone ever doing anything except digital, do they have
tri-modes now?

Well, that's one way to get out of a contract!

AT&T Wireless (whatever they call themselves now as it seems to change every
few months) is also pulling the plug next month.  I know one of their local
tower/site maintainers who confirmed it (at least for Southern California).