B Dubya asked a good question in a comment on an earlier post:

Timmer!
Serious question to an industry insider…
Why is it that cell coverage in the US is so spotty, when Europe and even Arabia are totally covered? What would it take to get the US system on a par with even the third world in this area?

And Occam’s Razor gets applied. While the U.S.A. was busy replacing our old, mostly copper cable, communication’s infrastructure with new, expensive, fiber optic cable in the 1990s, when cell phones were still kinda bulky and sort of a fad, the rest of the world basically said, “Hell, we can’t afford that fiber optic stuff stuff and we’ve got these new cell phone thingies, let’s just put up a whole bunch of cell phone towers instead.” That’s why countries that basically had crap land line service even 10 years ago, now have cellular communications infrastructure that beats ours to hell and back. There are some places in Europe that STILL haven’t switched to fiber and if you use a landline, you’re not going to believe how crappy the sound is. They’re basically still using cable that was laid just before or after WWII.

Add to that the fact that most countries have ONE cell phone provider, often run by the government, that provides one kind of service that everyone has, while we in the U.S.A. have about four big companies and multiple little ones, all competing for coverage and bandwidth, and you have the situation you’re bemoaning. Not all the cell phone companies play nice with one another either. If you’ve got a Brand X phone and are closest to a Brand Y tower, you may get signal off that Brand Y tower, but the Brand Y customers are going to take priority over you and your Brand X phone.

In short B Dubya, the U.S.A. could afford upgrading to fiber optic while many places in the rest of the world couldn’t, so they started building cell phone towers en masse instead of laying fiber. Most of the U.S.A.’s cell phone companies are working hard to play catchup and are learning to play nice with one another because they’re learning that customers don’t care it’s because Brand Y’s tower is down, I’M not getting service where I want it. We should have almost full coverage on all major highways with very few “dead” areas by the end of the decade, but because our companies all are competing for a market that’s rapidly becoming saturated, they’ve been concentrating on covering more densely populated areas first and slowly expanding to suburbia and rural areas. Cell phone towers are cheaper than fiber, but that doesn’t make them cheap. You’ve got to have enough customers paying a bill in an area to justify adding and maintaining a tower somewhere. You also have to have landowners that will agree to let you put a tower on their property.