We just rec'd a comment about someone's Verizon phone not working with the AT&T cell tower that just began servicing this area. I found an explanation as part of this web site - How Stuff Works, but so you don't need to hunt (it's in the chatter at the very bottom of the page), I've pasted it here. I found the explanation of how cell towers work was pretty interesting, so maybe some of you will want to check out that web site anyway.

AT&T uses the cellular technology GSM and UMTS if you live in the U.S. which, I assume you do and you have a T-Mobile phone then that phone would communicate with AT&T's towers to get service which would result in roaming charges. To answer your question though your phone would communicate first with the tower of whatever cellular company you get your service from first before communicating with another company's tower, regardless of distance from the nearest cell site. To reiterate though if there is no service from (let's say your carrier is T-Mobile) T-Mobile then your phone would begin searching for other cell sites that used the same technology as T-Mobile (GSM and/or UMTS, which is 3G though I'm not 100% sure if T-Mobile uses UMTS or not.) However if you had Sprint as your carrier and there was no Sprint coverage your phone would start searching for other carriers that use the same radio technology as Sprint which would be CDMA. The only other carrier that I know of in the U.S. that uses CDMA is Verizon so your Sprint phone would roam on Verizon's network. This means that only Sprint and Verizon phones can roam on each others network and the same relationship for AT&T and T-Mobile. There is currently no way for an AT&T or T-Mobile(GSM/UMTS) phone to connect to a Verizon or Sprint (CDMA) tower. However there are 4G phones which is a newer technology which includes LTE which Verizon & AT&T are running field tests of now and Sprint using Wi-Max which to my knowledge is not compatible with LTE. Which would mean in the future you would be able to use your phone (if it was an LTE phone) on both AT&T and Verizon's networks.

By the way - the ground hog did NOT see his shadow today - so can we expect an early spring? Probably not, but it's a pleasant thought. Six more weeks of winter can certainly be expected here, and probably two or three beyond that. March can be a pretty snowy and sometimes really cold month. However, we're gearing up to get Ice-Out tickets in all our usual area outlets. You'll find a list of them on the Ice-Out Contest pages on the web site.