AT&T lacks towers needed to keep campus connected

As many students who own AT&T phones know, good cell phone reception can be hard to find on campus, and computing services says they shouldn’t expect bad reception on the ULM campus to be fixed anytime soon.

Although the bad reception is often blamed on the computing center, that’s not the case, according to Adam Taylor, video and wireless tech for the computing center. Taylor said his office receives many calls from students complaining about the problem, but the blame is misplaced.

“Students think we’re the cause of it, but it’s out of our hands. It’s AT&T,” Taylor said. “As more people get smartphones, the worse the reception is going to get.”

According to cellreception.com, AT&T has only three towers within Monroe city limits. ULM is near the center of a triangle formed by two of the Monroe towers and one tower east of Lakeshore. Due to the distance of ULM’s campus from the towers, the signal strength is weaker than areas closer to the towers.

Taylor said AT&T had been contacted, but the company had no plan to add new towers anytime soon.

Customers in Northeast Louisiana who use the popular cell phone provider Verizon can enjoy better reception because it has twice as many towers as AT&T in the Monroe city limits. Sprint and T-Mobile have one tower a piece while Nextel has none.

Local AT&T representatives referred questioning to the New Orleans headquarters. Attempts to contact them were not returned.