Hi all..
Good discussion and many valid points and observations.
On a radio network installation basis, to get city-wide coverage in metropolitan areas, there is mostly not much difference in covering cities of similar scale. New York or Chicago or London or Tokyo or Shanghai or Moscow or Buenos Aires, is a similar task. So if you compare New York and Chicago and Los Angeles to European big cities like London, Paris, Frankfurt; or Asian cities like Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong; or developing world cities like Moscow, Buenos Aires or Johannesburg, the network experience should be similar.
By this test alone - and please ask your friends who travel a lot - it is totally obvious, to any travellers, that US cities have far more dead spots, and dropped calls, and network congestion than European, Asian or indeed developing world megacities.
Note, that there are some exceptional issues, in particular mountains, which make cellular coverage a more complex problem, consider Seattle or Oslo. Have a guess which has perfect radio coverage and which gets continuous problems in coverage..
Then for the rural area. Here the issue is not country size, it is like someone said earlier in this thread, it is population density. The population densities of Sweden and Finland are far less than those of the USA. Therefore it is significantly more difficult and expensive to deliver cellular coverage to rural areas the less dense that country is by population, ie to cover Finland or Sweden - countries that are a bit smaller than California, alone, and together are a bit bigger than Texas - is a bigger problem than to cover equivalent population in America.
So, take your average freeway like I-80 or I-10 in America and start to drive. See how rapidly you lose network coverage. Then take an equivalent drive in Finland or Sweden, and drive. Finland stretches about the distance from New York City to Chicago. You can drive on the main highways of Finland from Helsinki towards Lapland, and maintain near continuous cellular coverage almost half the way - I've done it. But if you start from New York and drive towards Chicago, you won't make it through the tunnel to New Jersey before losing coverage, and yes, if you take the bridge, you'll definitely lose your signal within the Garden State (I've done that too, used to live in the USA for 12 years)
But the kicker is equivalent big countries. The five giant countries of roughly the same size, and also being singular monolithic landmasses, are in order of size Russia, Canada, USA, China, Brazil and Australia. Canada, USA and Australia are advanced, industrialized world countries. Russia, China and Brazil are developing world countries, and you would expect them to have noticeably worse networks than the developed countries.
Australia has excellent networks (but the coverage is non-existent in the central parts of the country where nobody lives). Russia, China and Brazil have excellent networks. Only the US and Canada have bad networks. Ask any of your friends or colleagues, who has recently - past 2 years - lived in two of these countries, and I promise you they all agree, the US and Candaian networks (and carriers, and their customer services, and their handsets, and their pricing, and their calling centers, etc etc etc) are the worst of these six and the four other countries are better in every way..
I do not mean this as a critcism of America, I love America and I do business there all the time. I just find it frustrating that the US industry is so backwards, that it sustains all these punitive methods (crippling the phones, locking the phones, even that disasterous PR move of the Sprint 1,000 of "firing" the customers who complained "too much" when the network was literally the worst company in america and had all sorts of legitimate reasons to complain).
But it is a fact. The US cellular coverage is not as good as similar sized countries. And there is no "logical" reason for it (geography etc). The only reason is greed. American carriers are not in any way incentivized to give good service. They sell you a bundle of near-unlimited minutes and messages, but the networks are so congested and patchy, that you can't use them all...
The one good point is, that very slowly, the US industry is also improving its customer service and overall quality. Things are getting better. But all of my colleagues from both sides of the seas, say the same thing, if they move to or from the US, they email me and tell about how stunned they are about the cellular networks (either incredibly positively surprised if Americans moving abroad, or depressingly distressed if foreigners moving to America)
Please readers understand. "Third world" nations like Russia and China and Brazil - give you better networks, better handsets, better prices, better quality - than the US and Canada.. Its not just the network coverage, its everything. And ALSO please note, the CTIA, the US industry body, and the CWTA the Canadian industry body - do NOT DISPUTE these international comparisons.. This is not just some silly Finnish ex-nokia dude sitting in Hong kong telling you this.. This is consensus view of the major industry bodies worldwide.
Ok. enough of my rant. I hope the above helps show to some who find this strange. It is not a fault of Americans, and not a criticism of the USA. It is just a fact of the current market status, perhaps not unlike the airline industry (did you notice American airlines are also rated among the worst in the world by customer satisfaction and anyone attempting the same routes flown by both US carriers and international ones, tend to find the international carriers far far better. I personally don't have experience of Latin American airlines, but I am talking of European and Asian airlines and just about every major US and Canadian based airline. It is night-and-day).
Tomi Ahonen 😊