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Comment by vilius | Hacker News Reader

When visiting USA for the first time I was surprised how often I would be in a no reception zone. Drove just away from Miami to Everglades National Park - no reception for miles. Drove from SF to LA via Highway 1 - no reception for miles. Being from Europe I just took cell coverage for granted and always have assumed USA has the same.

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I experienced the same when I moved from China to US. In China the first time I ever experienced lost of signal was somewhere in the mountains in Tibet. Signal is just everywhere there.

US is incredibly bad on that. I live in the bay area and I can make an easy 30min drive to a place with no reception from any carriers.

I'm wondering why...

The national parks generally have no coverage - which is kind of perfect given what you go there for. Once you get off the East coast, there are even more no reception areas. In Wyoming and Idaho for example I had to drive my car some miles to the nearest town to get any reception since it was so valley-y and sparsely populated.

While the US does have a lot of no cell zones, those areas do have coverage. I wonder if your phone operated on GSM bands that didn't cover those areas. For a while in it was pretty common that if you wanted coverage in rural areas you opted for Verizon's CDMA network.

Driving from LA to SF via the 1 very definitely has areas with no cell coverage, it's a drive I make semi-regularly (a tiny leg of the my Seattle-LA treks), and there are many patches with no coverage, especially in big sur.

For some reason my mind had replaced hwy 1 with I-5. Whoops.

From the map, Europe has 0 cdma tower while US has pretty significant number of cdma towers. Maybe most european cell phones simply doesn't have cdma support which makes roaming to US difficult?

Edit: Glancing at the map, it seems no one use cdma anymore except a handful of countries like US, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Venezuela, and some part of North Africa.

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