Jake Kiessel gets requests every morning to call his customers before arriving at a repair stop.
If only he could. “If people say to call them before I get there, that doesn’t always work,” said Kiessel, an appliance service technician who works for a Traverse City store and resides near Lake Leelanau.
He does his best, carrying cell phones signed up for Verizon and AT&T services. Usually both have bars, sometimes only one works, and when traveling through notorious “dead zones” for coverage in Leelanau County both phones turn worthless.
“I’m so use to it that it’s just part of living here,” Kiessel said.
He’s got company. Poor cell phone coverage comes with the territory in hilly and sparsely populated Leelanau County, which only has 22,000 permanent residents. That places Leelanau 62nd out of 83 counties in the state in terms of population.
Suffice it to say we’re not a bastion of potential customers for major cell phone providers, which have responded with a slow-walk toward filling gaps in coverage. While county residents may have grown accustomed to unreliable phone service, the inconvenience comes as a surprise to tourists.
Matt Ansorge, county emergency ser- vices director, said visitors not stuck in dead zones have called 911 to complain about spotty service.
“Occasionally we get calls,” Ansorge said. “People aren’t use to it from where they come from.”
Cell phone technology now dominates communication in America, although many Leelanau residents find it difficult to understand why their calls go through one day and not the next.
Doug Whitely, a retired Leelanau Township resident who lives in the poorest-served part of the county, has been studying the issue for years. At times working with Ansorge, he has started compiling a glossary of cell phone coverage for Leelanau that he hopes to provide to residents when complete. Following are some of his findings.
You’re right. Coverage stinks in the summer
Residents can thank and blame tourism for its affect on phone coverage.
“We’re small,” Whitely said. “We’re rural. We’re surrounded by water. The only thing that makes Leelanau County special for cell companies is the tourism. We have hundreds of thousands of people who come to this county and ask, ‘What do you mean I can’t get cellular service?’ For someone to arrive in our county and be shocked that we don’t have cell service is the biggest advantage we have to get companies to provide better cell service.”
Now to the downside. Cell service below 5G coverage — we’ll get to that later, but it’s important to understand that most signals in Leelanau today are not 5G — gets diluted as more people access the same antennas. Think of it as pouring water through a two-inch pipe. Go slow and it all fits. Pour too much at once and you get spillage.
Now think of those drains in terms of the antennas placed on towers throughout the county. They’re able to handle calls, texts and emails from mostly county residents in winter, but not the volume typical of summer traffic.
That’s why a text might zip through air to its recipient on a Monday morning after going nowhere on Saturday afternoon.
Kiessel notices. “It feels like I’m at deer camp in the U.P.,” he said. “My phone is fine in the winter, but when the summer months come it drops right off.”
Leelanau’s thick woods further degrade service. And our moraines make it tough yearround for line-of-sight signals to penetrate protected valleys, Ansorge said.
Thankfully, emergency service responders — deputies, paramedics and firefighters — don’t have to wait in line. Responder calls placed through Verizon are given priority in the stream of phone traffic; AT & T provides a separate bandwidth, Ansorge continued.
No encyclopedia for cell service
Whitley naturally assumed that somewhere within the state or federal bureaucracy he’d find a clearinghouse of all the cell towers in Leelanau County, which would help him locate and understand dead zones.
He was wrong. “I’m trying to track down every tower in the county. I want to know what towers have,” Whitley said.
While he’s been successful in finding publicly owned towers — such as the four owned by Leelanau County or the one behind the Glen Lake fire station, which co-locate antennas for more than one cell phone company — many other towers are privately owned and built on private property.
Still others are less than 60 feet tall, which means they may not be licensed.
And some towers are owned by only one cell phone provider.
“There are proprietary towers, for example, owned by just one provider. That’s like the one (being built) in Suttons Bay, which is Verizon. It’s great to have a new Verizon tower, but that won’t help in Leelanau Township,” Whitley said.
While his work will benefit the entire county, Whitley became drawn to the issue because of his private situation. He resides on a gravel road well outside the Northport Village limits. In terms of internet and cell service, it’s the most underserved area of Leelanau County.
“I moved up eight years ago. Our cellular service was basically nonexistent, and it still is basically nonexistent. And we had no internet service,” Whitley said.
Internet was provided by a private company that built small towers on a neighbor’s cherry orchard and ran fiber cable down his road. His coverage is good, and his cell phone connects to his own modem that communicates through buried Internet cables that transmit to the orchard towers. As long as he stays on his own property, he can call anyone.
“It works good for me. I have a neighbor (who works from home) that it doesn’t work good for. It’s not acceptable for high service. But for my purposes and for streaming TV, it’s good,” Whitley said.
COVID brought to light our reliance on the Internet when students studied at home and whole businesses communicated through Zoom meetings. Whitley is a vocal advocate for a controversial new tower the county hopes to build on Leelanau Township property that has drawn the ire of its would-be neighbors.
“There are probably 300 or so residences who live north of the village without cell service. It becomes a crisis when people try to call 911,” Whitley said.
The evolution of cell service T-Mobile is making a major play for Leelanau County business, Whitley said, which may drastically change cell service in Leelanau County.
AT&T currently has about 80 percent of the county covered, Whitley estimates. “Verizon doesn’t have as many towers as AT&T, but I’m working on how many they have.”
Because cell service is like politics — everything is local — Whitley suggests that people considering buying a cell service talk to neighbors and friends before committing.
For instance, people may think living near a tower guarantees reliable service. That’s not true.
“People who are driving see towers and wonder why they can’t have service. Well, they aren’t all cell phone towers. They may be television or radio towers. And just because there is equipment on a tower, you don’t know how directed a given signal is. Some times they refer to it as a cone. So you have to ask, ‘Which way is that antenna pointing?’” Whitley asked.
Four major cell phone towers in Leelanau are owned by county government, including the largest. That’s a 460-foot tower off Pitt Road in southern Leland Township. Other county-owned towers are found near Maple City off Tower Road, the government center in Suttons Bay Township, and near Omena off Davis Road. All structures are occupied by more than one cell service provider.
T-Mobile bought the Sprint network in 2020 with a pledge to reach 90 percent of America with 5G service by 2026. Whitley said the promise comes with a $40 billion price tag.
As part of that effort, Whitley said T-Mobile plans to install 5G antennas on towers in southern Leelanau County. “If they get that, then I expect them to move up here,” he said.
Added Ansorge, ““Their business model is to start moving north, so they are identifying the Maple City tower and the Pitt Road tower for their equipment.”
Other firms aren’t stagnate: “Verizon is also upgrading equipment, so they could be improving their network as well,” he added.
The advantage of 5G is that the system can handle more data and is less apt to be slowed by heavy use. The disadvantage, at least for Leelanau County, is that signals may need boosting to travel as far as 4G systems.
Oh, and there’s a wild card at play in the world of cell phone service. Ansorge, who as manager of county cell towers often talks with industry representa- tives, said homes owned by company executives some times play into where and when service is extended. “It’s common knowledge. I wouldn’t be able to tell you who they are, but I’ve had conversations with field agents who come up here,” Ansorge said.
And then there are landlines, which some residents, especially those in poor cell zones, retain. Whitley still has his, an $85 per month guarantee than ensures a connection to the outside world should his cable go down.
It’s one reason he continues to push for improved cell service.
“These (landline) networks are over 100 years old. They can’t get parts. Copper is expensive, and a fiber network is relatively cheap. The old network is going to go away. If people north of Northport don’t have wireless service and they don’t have a copper line, how are they going to get 911 service?” Whitley asks.
Throughout Leelanau, cell phone users have learned to live with disrupted service. For Kiessel, that means connecting one of his cell phones to a wireless internet connection at a client’s house.
“I have to hop on peoples’ WiFi, and that’s OK. There’s nothing more frustrating than being on the phone for 20 minutes, then having your call dropped,” he said.
Kiessel knows where to avoid phone conversations.
“There are some places where your calls are dropped. By 9 Bean Rows. Lake Leelanau is pretty bad. Leland is horrible, too, and so are some random spots near Cedar,” Kiessel said.
