No Signal: The Worst Cellular Dead Zones in the US
Driving 10,000 miles to find America’s best mobile network, we hit some pretty bad dead zones—and they weren’t all in the countryside.
Cellular coverage in the US is much better than it used to be, and the Samsung Galaxy S22+ is really good at capturing signal. But there are still locations that are black spots for all three major carriers, usually because of some combination of terrain and restrictions on where they can build their towers.
We saw dropped calls and failures nationwide. Not a lot of them, but enough to annoy you. In general, about 1% of our calls and about 7% of our data sessions were dropped, blocked, or timed out. Drops happened in every city we tested, especially with big data downloads. You know that feeling when you’re looking at a web page on your phone, you get stalled and have to hit reload, and then it loads? That’s probably a blocked data connection.
In areas with coverage, these things happen for all sorts of reasons. Congestion is a big one, with too many people trying to get onto the airwaves at the same time. There can also just be glitches in the carriers’ computers, towers that went down or got disconnected, or errors in their internal internet systems.
In these eight places, though—forget about it. You’ll be lucky if you can connect a call at all, according to our testing. What can you do about that? A cellular booster for your car can help: Check out our list of the best cell phone signal boosters to eke out a bit more signal in these dead zones.
In the maps below, blue dots mark a failed AT&T test, yellow dots represent a failed T-Mobile test, and red dots are a failed Verizon test.
Just south of San Francisco, the eastern half of San Mateo County is the beginning of Silicon Valley. The
Read more on pcmag.com
