OK, TJ ; were you dropped on your head at birth or sometime thereafter? First AT&T covers over 50% of the UP with 3G service and I live in Houghton, MI; Marquette recieved 3G before Houghton as usual. And Verizon HAS sevrviced the area (entire UP) since the day they bought Alltell. I know because I was an Alltell customer at the time and the FTC required Verizon to give us quit the package deal as long as we kept our original numbers and contracts we had with Alltell. And there are only a few larger blocks where you can't recieve signal in the Upper Pennisula: two on US-2, one over buy Seenie and one the other side of Crystal Falls.
I was an Alltell/Verizon customer for nearly nine years, never had much trouble with my service or customer service. Except the three years I lived in Appleton, WI; I had to relocate the towers in the area once a month, or get dropped calls. I did find out the reason for this was Verizon was setting up towers in middle and south WI @ about one a week for over a year. Because of lack of employment for nearly a year, my phones were turned off for two months, when I went back to Verizon to have them turned on they wanted $900.00, oh they "promised" to give me $600 back; but that was unsatisfactory to me.