IDG News Service — For the past 10 years I've expected three constants when visiting the U.S.: friendly people, large portions of food and bad cell-phone coverage.

America's poor cell-phone networks have been a source of frustration and puzzlement for years -- how can such a technologically advanced country end up with "service" that routinely garbles messages and drops calls?

The service problems are highlighted in carrier advertisements, which often trumpet -- at the expense of service offerings -- attractions such as "fewest dropped calls." It has always struck me as strange that they would try to sell their services with the message that they'll mess up those services less than the competition.

In Japan, where I live, I've never seen a TV commercial boasting of fewest dropped calls because those are not a problem. And globally scattered colleagues say it's the same where they live. In my experience, even developing countries in Asia have vastly fewer problems than what I'd come to expect on my visits to the U.S.

What gives with that?

Ironically, America's advanced wireline network is partly to blame, says analyst Jeff Kagan.

"Historically, the U.S. has always had the best telephone service," he said. Back in the days of the wireline monopoly there were few complaints, calls connected quickly and service was available cheaply, says Kagan.

Indeed, as a teenager growing up in the U.K. and getting my impressions of America from TV, I came to envy the telephone lines that U.S. teens all apparently had in their bedrooms. But what I envied most was that local calls were free. The U.K. phone monopoly was run by the post office back then, and I remember trying to make calls sometimes and being told by a recorded message to try again because all lines to another part of the country were engaged.

In other countries, fixed lines were less common or were too expensive, so cellular played a more important role than in the U.S.

The use of different technologies is another reason that U.S. cellular service isn't on par with other countries. CDMA (code division multiple access), GSM (global system for mobile communications) and W-CDMA (wideband code division multiple access) are all used and they operate in different frequency bands, so phones are less common that switch networks when the service provider's signal drops. Reliance on a single technology in many other countries means that smaller networks can often fill in the gaps with coverage from a larger partner.

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