Reading · My Adirondack Diary

The three major cell phone service providers are rolling out a major new expansion in north country network coverage that will benefit all users.

August 8, 2026 ~ Vol. 69

North country residents have long endured very spotty cell phone coverage, owing in part to the Adirondack Park Agency’s restrictions on the construction of the requisite cell phone towers to transmit the calls. There are numerous “dead zones” throughout the park, where no cell phone towers are near enough to provide coverage. All of this is about to change as the three major service providers—Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile—have joined forces to launch a constellation of small low earth orbit (LEO) satellites to provide coverage in remote rural areas including the New York north country. They combined their resources to compete with similar services offered through Starlink, a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX. Over the next year, north country cell and internet customers will have new services, and new types of services to consider, and it is important to understand the pros and cons of each. Be prepared for a barrage of advertising and solicitations trumpeting the pros—but not the cons—of each of these services.

Providing internet and cell phone coverage to north country residents has been a decades long struggle, hampered by the the mountainous topography of the Adirondacks, a sparse population lacking the scale to attract providers, and Adirondack Park Agency (APA) restrictions on the construction of the towers that traditional cell coverage require. The introduction of “wi-fi calling” on many cell phones in 2015 gave north country cell phone users the opportunity to make calls over their wifi provider’s network, but only if they had a suitable broadband internet provider and the provider’s service was fast enough to handle the transmissions. Satellite internet service at the time was limited to GEO stationary satellite coverage from companies like HughesNet and ViaSat. Those satellites orbit in a fixed stationary location near the equator (0° latitude / 75° longitude). Calls using geostationary satellites have to travel to a satellite over the equator, 22,236 miles high—and back. The latency of that back and forth radio signal, traveling through and being degraded by the atmosphere, is the reason that satellite wifi calls using satellite service providers like HughesNet or ViaSat were less than perfect, and remain sketchy at best when compared to the alternative services. The issue is the latency in the signal that must travel - as a radio wave - to the equator and back. The location of the receiving device was often problematic as radio waves sent from satellites can be obstructed by things like trees and weather and mountains. Here in the Adirondacks, we have lots of trees and mountains. They are nice to look at, but sometimes they do get in the way of radio waves. Anyone trying to listen to SIRIUS Satellite radio as they drive between Keene Valley and St. Huberts on Route 73 knows about this satellite signal-but-mountain-in-the-way dynamic.

Ten years ago, in 2016, SLIC Network Solutions rolled out their first fiber optic internet service in the town of Long Lake in the Adirondacks of northern New York. The new fiber optic broadband service utilized signals traveling at the speed of light, offering gigabit plus speeds and ultra-low latency (5-20 milliseconds compared to 25 to 600 ms for satellite.) All else being equal, any fiber optic service provides faster service than any satellite service. Fiber optic service in the Adirondacks is supported by a backbone of fiber optic communications cables that run along the Adirondack Northway (Route 87) from downstate up to Canada. Internet data transmitted through this cable is traveling faster, by orders of magnitude, than radio wave transmissions which are diffused and degraded in the atmosphere.

But all else is not always equal. To provide their service, fiber optic service internet providers like SLIC must install their own fiber optic cables along the existing networks of utility poles, alongside the already installed electric and telephone lines. This “last mile” of installation is enormously expensive to build. When SLIC built out the network of fiber optic cables in the town where I live, Schroon Lake, NY, the initial project cost exceeded $2.5 million, to provide service to only 457 homes. The cost per home was over $5,000. Obviously, with an original build out cost that high, it would take decades for a service provider to make back their original investment before they actually made the first penny of profit. New York State provided a grant for the majority of the money to build out a fiber optic network in Schroon Lake and eventually in most of rural New York. (Full disclosure - I served on the Town of Schroon Broadband Internet committee that supported the New York State grant to SLIC.) The New York State grant was actually a “re-grant” program, utilizing an old national FCC fund that had been used to ensure that remote rural residents were provided with residential phone service, from the days of the original rollout of landline phones. Since most people who wanted a land line phone had a phone at that point, the FCC re-purposed that fund from land line phone installations to broadband.

Most homeowners now have access to a fiber optic connection, but some people in remote areas, far from the last utility pole, still lack high speed internet service via a fiber optic connection. They continue to rely on satellites. Even those who have fiber optic service and wifi calling at their homes, lose the signal as soon as they walk beyond the coverage of the house wifi if there is not a cell phone tower nearby. (That wood be me.)

Enter Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite systems. In 2020, Elon Musk’s Starlink system was launched. These satellites, as the name suggests, orbit at a much lower altitude than geostationary satellites, usually at altitudes between 100 and 1200 miles, considerably closer than a GEO’s altitude of 22,000 plus miles. There are also thousands of LEO satellites in orbit so the time for a signal to get to one of them and back is considerably faster than with a geostationary system over the equator. All satellites still depend on a radio signal, so fiber optic systems are still much faster than satellite systems. Satellite systems also required a line of sight from the house to the satellite, so trees and mountains and weather are still issues that fiber optic does not have to contend with. LEO satellites have a slight location advantage over GEO’s, because the angle of transmission, the “elevation angle”, is lower for the Geo-stationary system aiming at the equator, whereas a LEO satellite will generally aim straight up, so trees and mountains are less of a problem. The weather still is.

The good news, and the current news, is that this week a new Verizon / AT&T / T-Mobile “AST SpaceMobile” partnership is scheduled to launch the first of their own constellation of low earth orbit satellites, called “Bluebird”. The consortium will compete directly with Starlink. Unlike Starlink, which requires a proprietary Starlink terminal to operate, these new services will be provided and included on existing phone equipment with satellite capability. Three satellites were scheduled to launch this week, with a total of forty five planned over the next year. The group plans to roll out their own “satellite to cellular” service throughout the continental United States, with an introduction of beta services targeted for late 2026, followed by a full rollout in 2027. If you have a relatively new Apple or Android phone that supports wi-fi calling, you probably already have access to Verizon’s messaging and Emergency SOS service through their existing satellite network. These existing emergency services require a line of sight “clear view of the sky” to function. This new expanded service will employ a new technology that will work indoors.

From PC Magazine:

AST SpaceMobile will work indoors by utilizing low-band cellular frequencies (like 850 MHz) leased from carriers like AT&T and Verizon. These low-band signals travel long distances and easily penetrate building materials and foliage, while massive space-based antennas amplify weak signals so standard indoor phones can connect.

Cell phone customers will soon have access to all phone services over the new Bluebird LEO satellite network to provide coverage when you are outside of traditional cell phone coverage. This improvement will provide a dramatic improvement in rural area cell phone service. For many residents in the Adirondacks, it will provide the first opportunity to have cell service.

I am old enough to remember using my parents’ single, wall-mounted, land line phone in the kitchen, and having to wait for the people on the shared “party-line” to get off the phone so we could make a call. I remember the excitement of finally getting our own phone line. This will be better than that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

AT&T’s announcement:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In review, fiber optic broadband is better than low earth orbit (LEO) satellite service, which is better than geostationary (GEO) satellite service, which is better than nothing.

As a general rule: Fiber Optic > LEO > GEO > Nothing.

All to frequently, I see social media posts where people will talk about their own personal cell phone or internet service provider and declare that their provider is the best, and recommend that everyone should subscribe to that particular service. All too often, their well meant recommendations are misinformed. Choosing which type of service you should subscribe to should depend on what you are doing with the service, your location, and your budget. If all that you are doing is checking your emails, satellite—LEO or even GEO—might be working fine for you. If you have people in your household who are into online gaming or they want to stream separate movies simultaneously or you need to download work projects that include managing large data sets or downloading massive graphics files — you want (read, need) a fiber optic connection—if that option is available in your location. Most of us are somewhere in between.

In the meantime, let us celebrate the introduction of this new service providing our most remote rural neighbors with cell phone service and an internet connection. Some of us will only use the new coverage to complement our existing service but for some this will be the first opportunity to use a cell phone or have an internet connection at their home or workplace in the north country. Great news indeed. Spread the word!

Comments and suggestions are always welcome, as are Shares. If you like what you have read and you would like to receive a Saturday morning email with the most recent Adirondack Diary update, please consider subscribing. All posts are public and available for free.

Can you hear me now?

Comments