Roxi McCormick had to sign up with three different cell phone companies. Danny Wood grumbles through dropped calls on the regular. And Candice Bannister never seems to have more than two bars to work with on her phone.
All three live in different parts of rural Colorado, but they have one thing in common: poor cell phone service where they live and work.
McCormick, who lives outside of Proctor in northeast Colorado, works in farm services. She collects soil moisture data on croplands. Her moisture probes depend on wireless service to transmit data to the cloud. That’s how she ended up in cell service contracts with Verizon, Viaero, and AT&T.
“I could put in a probe in one location with one service and go three miles away and have to put a totally different service in,” she said. “Because I cannot get the same service within three to four miles of each other.”
But even that strategy doesn’t always work, and she finds calls are frequently dropped.
“With the systems that we work with, it's basically a crapshoot where you can find good service,” McCormick explained. “It's frustrating that I cannot conduct my business or even have personal phone calls without losing service.”
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Danny Wood, who lives in the nearby town of Peetz, said he frequently encounters dead spots in rural northeast Colorado
“I don't understand because there should be service there, like anywhere else. I don't understand what the deal is,” he said. “It can be a problem because if you have an emergency, there's places you can't get ahold of anybody.”
Miles away, in Steamboat Springs, Candice Bannister's service isn’t much better. She said that even in the heart of downtown, her connection is too slow to use the internet on her phone.
“I try to keep it in perspective that this is a first-world problem, and not get too frustrated by it,” she said. “But when I see two bars every day, and this has become the status quo, there's certainly a concern there.”
She called the lack of cell service on mountain roads and trails a safety issue.
Bannister, Wood, and McCormick all question why rural cell service remains so poor nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century.
Economics and topography pose the biggest challenges
The answer lies in simple economics, according to Carri Bennet, general counsel for the Rural Wireless Association, a national advocacy group for rural wireless companies. Most rural areas are too sparsely populated for companies to invest in the number of transmission towers it would take to provide complete coverage.
“If there's no one to pay for it, you can't build it.” Bennet said. “It takes about 1,000 people to support one cell tower. And you think of all the areas you'd have to put up those towers where there's no people, you just can’t do it. It's just cost prohibitive.”
She said better rural coverage must be subsidized.
To a large extent, it already is. The Universal Service Fund, or USF, is a federal program that collects fees from all telephone users to subsidize essential services, including wireless in so-called “high-cost areas.” But Bennet said the funding isn’t nearly enough to blanket rural America with reliable cell phone coverage.
As to the current state of rural wireless coverage, Bennet said it’s anyone’s guess. Service maps distributed by the major wireless carriers are notorious for vastly overstating their reach. But according to Bennet, you can get a good estimate of where wireless coverage is lacking by looking out the window of an airplane at night.
“A lot of those areas where you don't see the lights are probably very close to the areas that are not served,” she said.
Mountainous areas can be particularly tricky, even where cell towers are plentiful. Wireless technology depends on a direct line of sight between the cell tower and the device. Mountains and thickly forested areas can disrupt that.
“Anything that's got up and down to it, like mountains, valleys, ravines, it's really hard to get coverage,” Bennet said.
Despite the difficulties, Bennet said it’s important to prioritize improving wireless coverage for the least populated areas.
“When you talk about the future of growing crops and raising animals and oil and where all our natural resources come from, in this country, we've got to have some sort of connectivity out there,” she said.
Legislative solutions could be on the horizon
Colorado lawmakers created the Cell Phone Connectivity Interim Study Committee in 2024 to develop legislative solutions to poor rural cell service. The committee is advancing three policy proposals that members hope to introduce during next year’s legislative session.
Poor cell service is a public safety issue for committee member Rep. Jennifer Bacon. She said one of the committee’s biggest challenges is treating cell service as a public utility, even though it's provided by companies focused on their financial bottom line.
“If we're going to talk about it as a safety issue, then we have to somewhat treat it like utility by way of state investment,” Bacon told KUNC. “Since [cell service companies] are not utilities and we can't make them do things, we have to figure out how.”
Cell phone companies already have a deal with the federal government to allow emergency calls even when there’s little or no service. Under such circumstances, smartphone users might see “SOS” instead of their usual service bars. In many parts of Colorado, however, there’s not even enough service for "SOS" calls.
Much of the committee’s work focuses on rural areas and finding ways to subsidize connectivity infrastructure where populations are too low to justify building cell towers.
According to Bacon, one of the bills the committee is developing would provide incentives for service providers to lower the costs of building infrastructure where it's not always financially viable. Such incentives could be tax breaks or abatements.
The committee is also exploring ways to piggyback on state infrastructure, especially in the mountains. The idea is to make it easier and cheaper for companies to build more connectivity. For example, lawmakers hope to find ways to improve existing roadways and railways and develop new onesso that they can be paired easily with cell towers. The state has taken a similar approach in recent years to expanding broadband infrastructure.
Lawmakers also want a better idea of where cell service gaps are located. The committee is developing a bill that would direct the state to map out connectivity and identify what areas have been left out. It’s not yet clear how the mapping will work, however, because companies aren't required to release cell tower locations, which are considered proprietary information.
Bacon agrees that there is a major connectivity problem in rural areas. She also said the committee also needs to address service issues in Denver and other cities.
“When you say big city, no one thinks that we have these problems,” Bacon said. “Maybe it's true, but I'm still trying to be sure it is as deeply explored.”
Bacon represents northeast Denver, where she hears from constituents about bad service in neighborhoods like Northfield. According to service providers, problems in populated areas are generally because the existing cell towers are over theircapacity. There isn’t enough infrastructure in place to support the number of people using their phones.
The answer is to build more cell towers, but Bacon said local communities often oppose them despite the lack of service.
