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Boy, that's the truth. More than half the time, when I try to call my husband's cell phone, it doesn't ring, it tells me the service doesn't exist, he can't hear me, I leave a message that he "doesn't get" ... I'm infuriated every time I pay the freepin' bill.

Apparently the only time cell phones work is when all parties involved are driving their cars!

A little info on market 'opertors' excerpted from last year's FCC report on telecommunications:

a. Market Structure
40. In the United States, there are six mobile telephone operators that analysts typically describe as nationwide:

AT&T Wireless,
Sprint PCS,
Verizon Wireless, LLC ("Verizon Wireless"),
T-Mobile,
Cingular Wireless, LLC ("Cingular Wireless" or "Cingular"), and
Nextel.

When an operator is described as being "nationwide," it does not necessarily mean that the operator's license areas, service areas, or pricing plans cover the entire land area of the United States.
The six mobile telephony carriers that analyst reports typically describe as nationwide all offer service in at least some portion of the western, midwestern, and eastern United States.
In addition, each of the six national operators has networks covering at least 200 million people, while the next largest provider covers less than 60 million people. In addition to the nationwide operators, there are a number of large regional players, including

ALLTEL Corp. ("ALLTEL"),
Western Wireless Corp. ("Western Wireless"),
United States Cellular Corp. ("US Cellular"), and
Dobson.

Related article excerpt:

Switching Cell Phone Providers - Why Bother?
By Jay Lyman
Wireless NewsFactor
October 15, 2002 10:30AM
The factors wireless subscribers must consider -- in addition to sign-up fees and contract duration -- include when they use the service, whether they use long distance and, incredibly, whether they actually can converse with others on the carrier's network.
...
Paying for Performance
But Forrester senior analyst Charles Golvin told Wireless NewsFactor that quality of service is just as likely as price to be the impetus for change.
"They may be spurred by price or expiration of their contract," Golvin said. "Still, the number one thing, in terms of complaints, is the quality."

Recommended site - a presentation of the technology and driving force as well as history behind 'cellular' phone technology:

Cellular Telephone Basics: AMPS and Beyond

Cellular radio provides mobile telephone service by employing a network of cell sites distributed over a wide area.
A cell site contains a radio transceiver and a base station controller which manages, sends, and receives traffic from the mobiles in its geographical area to a cellular telephone switch. It also employs a tower and its antennas, and provides a link to the distant cellular switch called a mobile telecommunications switching office. This MTSO places calls from land based telephones to wireless customers, switches calls between cells as mobiles travel across cell boundaries, and authenticates wireless customers before they make calls.
Cellular uses a principle called frequency reuse to greatly increase customers served. Low powered mobiles and radio equipment at each cell site permit the same radio frequencies to be reused in different cells, multiplying calling capacity without creating interference. This spectrum efficient method contrasts sharply with earlier mobile systems that used a high powered, centrally located transmitter, to communicate with high powered car mounted mobiles on a small number of frequenices, channels which were then monopolized and not re-used over a wide area.

MUCH more - see link above.

I travel all over the U.S. A Verizon wireless CDMA cell phone (Kyocera 2235 or Kyocera 2325) with the America's Choice package covers me everywhere. There are very few places where I am out of my plan area. I also have the CDMA 1XRTT service so I can make an internet hookup to turn in my web-based timecard.

I avoid PCS service as it requires many more towers, thus you find it mostly in large metro areas and along major freeways. You lose service if you get off the main road.

GSM service is a European variant of TDMA with lots of standardized protocol services layered on top. Internet connectivity via GPRS packet is about 1/3 the speed of 1XRTT, but has the characteristic of being better interactively. 1XRTT works great for "bursty" activity like web browsing and file transfers. An interactive editor e.g. "vi" to a Linux host would be fine over GPRS and nightmarishly bursty over CDMA. Ditto for simple telnet sessions. If PCS coverage is bad, GSM is the absolute worst. Only a few major metro areas have it at this time. The single "nice" feature of GSM phones is the ability to move a "SIM" card from one cell phone to another. All your service account info is on the SIM card and manufacturers do a fairly decent job of adhering to a "one size fits all" on SIM cards.

It's a crap shoot as to whether I can make a cell phone call from my house. When I get within about a mile the area where I live, the phone falls back to Analog Roaming.

Most likely the reason is that there are not enough towers - we don't have full coverage here, and it's not Timbuktu either. One reason there aren't enough towers is that a bunch of ninnies start whining every time a tower is proposed.

They even had them bolt on fake evergreen tree limbs onto one of the towers! It looks awful - it looks like a really bad (and big) artifical Christmas tree.