Who has the best cell coverage? It depends on where you are

Cingular Wireless is running ads saying it has ''the fewest dropped calls," and Verizon Wireless is running ads calling itself ''the nation's most reliable wireless network," but Mort Rosenthal says no one company has the best coverage everywhere.


Breaking News Alerts Rosenthal, the chief executive of IMO, a new breed of retailer that sells every major wireless brand, knows what he's talking about. The Waltham company has done its own road testing and, unlike the cellular companies, makes the test data available to customers so they can tell town by town, or block by block, which carrier has the strongest signal coverage.

''It's kind of silly what they're all doing," Rosenthal said of the sweeping ad campaigns by some wireless companies. ''Consumers only care if their calls get through. It all comes down to the personal patterns of the end user who has the best coverage."

IMO's signal strength data shows all the carriers have fairly strong signals in downtown Boston, but in outlying areas there are color-coded gaps in every carrier's coverage.

In Wellesley, for example, the Verizon map is nearly all green (for strong coverage) with a few tiny blotches of red indicating the weakest coverage. The Cingular map has a substantial amount of yellow (weaker coverage), Sprint has even more yellow, and Nextel the most.

On Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester, the IMO maps are all uniformly green except for Nextel's, which is sprinkled with yellow.

In Milton, along the expressway, the IMO maps indicate Cingular has the best coverage, followed by Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Nextel.

Rosenthal says it's impossible to say one carrier's signal is always superior to another, but that's what the wireless companies are doing with their advertising campaigns. As the Globe reported last week, the claims are often accompanied with little or no evidence to back them up.

Cingular cites an unnamed research firm for its claim that it has the fewest dropped calls. Verizon cites internal testing for its reliability claims, but the backup data it makes available on its website is sketchy and dated. Sprint claims it has the most powerful network but offers no support for that claim.

Many readers last week said the Cingular claim about fewest dropped calls didn't seem to encompass them.

Ray Harrold of Northborough said he has trouble making calls with his Cingular phone in the Interstate 495/Route 20 area. ''I don't have dropped calls because I can only make so few calls," he said.

IMO, shorthand for Independent Mobile, tries to help consumers such as Harrold steer clear of such situations. Unlike a store owned by an individual wireless company, IMO sells the plans and phones of every company, so it doesn't have any particular ax to grind. It attempts to sift through its extensive database to find what phone and service plan best matches each customer's needs.

''This is not an industry that's consumer focused," Rosenthal said. ''We're trying to address that."

The IMO store in Framingham at Shopper's World is bright and colorful, combining hands-on testing of phones and personal digital assistants with sophisticated computer analysis.

At a sleek service bar along one wall, customers can pull up a comfy stool and, with the help of a customer service person, review on a computer screen phones, service plans, and coverage for Cingular, Nextel, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

Pick the features you want and the screen displays the phones that have them. Pick the ZIP codes and, moving the map's focus point around, you can see how the different carriers compare on signal strength where you live, work, or along your commuting route.

Because prices and plans are changing constantly, IMO employs four people just to keep its database up to date.

IMO earlier this year also hired an independent firm to track the signal strength of the various carriers along 5,500 miles of roads in Boston and its surrounding suburbs, with a heavy focus on those areas west of the city.

Rosenthal said IMO will update the road testing every six months and expand it as more stores are added. IMO opened its first Boston-area store in February and plans to add six more in the next year. Ultimately, he said, IMO hopes to operate a national chain with 20 stores in Boston.