I'm generally pretty jaded when it comes to carrier claims of coverage area. But I must admit that I was impressed by this.

The picture below was taken at the Racetrack in Death Valley. It's a 28 mile, 90 minute drive recommended for only high-clearance 4x4's into the back country. It's the location of the famous sliding rocks (you can see one of the trails in the bottom right) and I saw a total of 6 cars/10 people in my day-long trip out there. All of the NPS guides warn you to notify someone of where you are going, carry extra water/supplies/etc for a visit, etc., etc.

And yet, as you can see, my Sprint Bold 9650 picked up 3 bars of an EVDO signal and tested to 1.35Mbps of downlad while standing out on the playa.

I think the nearest Ranger station is 33 miles away (at Scotty's Castle) and no one lives closer than a 73 miles drive in Stovepipe Wells, 23 miles as the crow flies over two mountain ranges.

Perhaps some paid-for installation for the NPS to assist stranded visitors?

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

Wikipedia is great... I had no idea a cell tower had a range of 20-30 miles, given how clustered they are around me (I guess more for capacity than coverage). From one coverage map I found, it looks like someone plopped one cell right in the middle of the wilderness to cover much of the backcountry. Sprint does have roaming coverage in that area on their map. Nice safety feature.

Yet in the middle of manhattan, in my old office building, I could not get a signal at 5 pm on the sidewalk (which is actually why I gave up on sprint).

I have all kinds of trouble in Manhattan with AT&T as well. I blame the buildings.

Not blaming sprint at all, they just had no coverage in that specific block or so. I use them for data, and have wonderful coverage as they continue to roll out their 4g.

Cell phone coverage in densely populated areas is very tricky. First because of buildings blocking the signal but that is something that cell phone providers can handle. Buildings don't tend to move and the position of the cell phone towers or antennas can be easily adapted. There is a much greater problem in densely populated areas. The broadcast cell breathes which means depending on how many phones are logged on in a cell the cell changes the size of its broadcast size. As long people enter a cell the cell will increase the signal strength to accommodate all the phones until it reaches the legal maximum output. So now more people entering the cell but the cell can't boost the signal so the broadcast area decreases. Now people drop out of the cell and pick up the signal from another cell which now has the stronger signal. So in cities with a lot of overlapping cells you have a constant increasing and decreasing of cells which is pretty difficult to predict and calculate. Sometimes the limits the cell size down to couple of feet.

In the desert now where only a few people a cell tower can easily cover a much larger area even if this means several miles.