Your Apartment Search: Cell Phone Reception

When conducting your apartment search, you’ll have so many factors to consider that one very important one could completely slip your mind: cell phone reception. Consider why cell phone reception is an important factor to consider before you sign the rental agreement and how to best find out how good an area’s reception is:

How Often You Use Your Cell Phone

Consider how often you use your cell phone and imagine how difficult it would be if you could only use your cell phone while on the go and not at all while at home. While many people do have land lines at home, the number of people who skip land lines entirely in favor of cell phones grows larger each year. Apartment dwellers especially make up a large percentage of the people who don’t use land lines.

Even if you can install a land line, you can’t use any of your cell phone features at home if your apartment search lands you in an area with poor cell phone reception. That means no texting, no checking voice mail and no using all the applications you’ve downloaded on your smart phone. Since you’ll be spending a considerable amount of time at home-and the time you don’t spend at home, you’ll probably be much busier-you want to make sure that your apartment will have adequate cell phone reception.

Check the Reception: Visit Ahead of Time

The easiest way to fairly reliably check the cell phone reception in an apartment is to conduct tours of the apartments during your apartment search if possible. When in the apartment, pull out your cell phone and check the bars. Excuse yourself and try making a call.

However, don’t rely on the results of a visit entirely. It’s possible you’ll be touring a model apartment and not the one you would move into and maybe the model apartment is in a better location for reception. If this is the case, ask the landlord if you can test reception in the actual apartment.

When you can’t tour the apartment beforehand, particularly if you’re moving there from out of state, try to determine the cell phone reception online.

Check the Reception: Online

There are a number of websites that attempt to tell you how strong cell phone reception is in any ZIP code. Type in the ZIP codes of the complexes you’re considering in your apartment search and see how many towers there are in the area, which cell phone companies operate the towers (the more towers for your carrier, the better the reception) and what people who live in the area have to say about cell phone reception. This will not be as accurate a check as checking the place in person, particularly since it covers an entire ZIP code, but it can provide a basic understanding of the strength of reception.

Don’t forget to consider cell phone reception when you undergo your apartment search and you’ll be much happier once you’ve moved into your new home. If you don’t consider cell phone reception and you wind up with an apartment in a poor reception area, there’s not much you can do to get better reception besides trying to get a more stable cell phone provider once you’ve already signed the rental agreement.