What do you do as a network operator in places where hundreds and hundreds of people waiting in line and potentially tens of thousands on people visiting that place every day? Right, you make sure you have excellent network coverage in that spot to keep your customers happy while they are standing in line. There's your chance, the people are bored while waiting in line so it's a good opportunity to sell some voice minutes or some bits of data when your subscribers make good use of the idle time. Maybe they even take a picture and send it to mom via MMS!? But in some places of the world, clocks are ticking differently.
Recently I was up the Empire State Building in New York, which exactly resembles this scenario, except…, well, there's no network coverage up there from any GSM operator. And it's not that you are just there for a couple of minutes. If you come at the wrong time you probably have to wait more than an hour in a no network coverage area. I am stunned, really! Ah hold on yes, there was some sort of coverage, AT&T UMTS coverage was indicated on the iPhone of my neighbor. Very good reception was indicated but each time he wanted to use the phone the bars went away. Not sure what that was but a coverage that is not working is even worse than no coverage at all. Yes, I am not amused.
I had a tmobile SIM card and I thought it was just them that didn’t have coverage. I had nothing at the statue of Liberty either. People were talking at the top of the ESB though so I guess they must have been on one of the CDMA networks.