Mott cell tower activated

• AT&T

AT&T tower now active

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Residents of Mott and surrounding areas are enjoying cellphone service now that an AT&T tower has been activated.

“Service is tremendously better now,” said Mott Mayor Troy Mosbrucker. “Everybody’s happy. The city’s happy. We can contact our employees now.”

Prior to AT&T taking over the Alltel network in June 2010, Mott residents had patchy cell service, he said.

“Once you were in a building it wouldn’t work,” Mosbrucker said. “Now it works wherever you’re at.”

AT&T Spokesman Alex Carey said the Mott tower was one of the last 10 towers in North Dakota that became fully operational in the last few weeks.

“The activation process itself is several steps,” Carey said. “They weren’t active because they were being built.”

The Mott tower was partially constructed by Alltel, but AT&T installed equipment that will make the service better than ever, he said.

“They had Alltel service, but it was from another tower so the coverage wasn’t as good as it will be now in that area because now they have their own tower,” Carey said. “It will be a stronger signal, faster data speed and less if any dropped calls.”

The service makes city employees’ jobs easier, since they can now communicate with each other from across town, which they were unable to do before, Mosbrucker said.

“We had to physically drive around and find them to see where they were at,” Mosbrucker said. “That was frustrating.”

Many local entities were getting fed up with the lack of cell service, he said.

“The county, the police, everybody was about ready to switch to Verizon until they activated that tower,” Mosbrucker said. “If they wouldn’t have activated that tower when they did, they’d have lost the city employees and the county was looking at switching too.”

Since the tower has been finished, he said service seems to be reliable.

“We’re delighted that AT&T has invested heavily in technology in Mott and across the state,” Andy Peterson, president of the North Dakota Chamber of Commerce, said in a press release. “Mobile broadband communications is the lifeblood of many local businesses and important to job creation and the growth of our city and state’s economy.”

Tags: cell phone tower, news, mott