Last week I bemoaned the fact that my T-Mobile cellular service had become so poor I resorted to a high-gain aftermarket antenna to grab a signal.

Reader John Constantine feels my pain: "I suffered with T-Mobile and the Razr they sold me for years. Our home is in a small valley between two towers. We had such poor reception that my friends at Spotwave Wireless sent me a commercial-grade repeater that couldn't get enough signal to work at home! My wife still suffers poor signal in her home office, but can take the call if she walks outside … and T-Mobile says their coverage [in our area] is good to excellent. I suffer no longer; won an iPhone and had to switch to AT&T."

I used to have AT&T but they annoyed me so much I switched to T-Mobile. My contract runs out in December. Hey, AT&T. Want another customer?

Reader Thomas Tetter (Thomasville, N.C.) also feels my pain: "I've experienced something that sounds similar to your cell reception issue. Two years ago, I suddenly lost all cell reception in my office at work. I could drive half a mile away from my office in any direction and suddenly get full service again. I had had perfect service for four years prior to this situation."

Tetter is an Alltel customer or, as he put it "… a Verizon or whoever-owns-Alltel-this-week customer." Tetter started with tier-one techies and, "not surprisingly that yielded no results. I have yet to find the tier one of any large service provider to be worth the space they occupy, even when you consider that the universe is infinite."

Alltel loaned Tetter a refurbished phone, a different make and model from the original phone, but that didn't help. He could travel a half mile in any direction and get a good signal but "heading back to my office yielded no service and a lot of customer angst."

Tetter then managed to do the near impossible: He caused a big enough commotion that Alltel actually assigned a field engineer to his case! For once the mountain came to Mohammad.

The field engineer set up Thomas'number on his diagnostic phone and, miracle of miracles, the engineer's phone was now no better than Thomas'. At this point choirs of angels burst into song, the light of truth bathed the scene in glory and the engineer joined up the dots.

I'll let Tetter explain: "Your phone number is used in the algorithm that establishes communication … with the tower. What's not obvious is that in some cases, the quality of the signal you receive is not so much dependent upon the closest tower, but which receiver on that tower communicates with your phone. In my case, Alltel had recently upgraded all the receiving antennas in the closest tower to my office. When they did that, one of those three receivers (which was the receiver pointed towards my office) had a firmware incompatibility with an older network card in the tower."