It all started about four months ago. That is when Verizon Wireless customers who live in the Animas Valley and Falls Creek Ranch subdivision north of Durango say they noticed a sharp decline in the quality service.
Calls were dropped. Data stopped working. Signal strength went from two or three bars to no bars.
Some say it happened almost overnight, around the Memorial Day weekend, possibly after a lighting strike. Others say service is intermittent, good on some days, abysmal on others.
Verizon says it is aware of the problems. It blames the poor service on high demand during the peak summer tourism season.
Whatever is casing the interruptions in service, residents say they are not happy.
“I can’t even make a phone call to Verizon to complain that I can’t make phone calls,” said Jennifer Dai, who lives north of Durango.
(Several phone calls made to Animas Valley and Falls Creek Ranch residents during the reporting of this story were made difficult because of dropped calls or periods of inaudible exchanges.)
Dai is one of dozens of Verizon customersnorth of Durango who have noticed unreliable cellphone service on the Verizon network.
“We switched to Verizon in the summer of 2020, and it worked great, and it was so good that I would often use my cellular data in the house as opposed to my Wi-Fi, because it was actually faster,” Dai said. “It was overnight that it stopped working. That was in May.”
Verizon said the slow down had to do with the number of people using its network during the summer months.
“We began to see an increase in network traffic in the Animas Valley area right after Memorial Day weekend, and it’s continued throughout the summer,” said Verizon communications manager Heidi Flato. “This seasonal increase may have caused some customers to experience service degradation during peak times.”
But residents say they are still experiencing shoddy service, even now as the peak season is ending. Dai said earlier this month things were working better with her cell service, but things have gotten worse again.
“Last week it started with the same exact issues,” Dai said. “I bought a $2,000 cellphone booster and it (problems) started again last week.”
Dai heard from her neighbors that Spectrum customers were also experiencing problems with service, but that was being blamed on a a lightning strike in the area back in June. Understanding that Spectrum and Verizon use the same towers, Dai inquired with Verizon if lightning strikes might be responsible for the lapse in service. She said Verizon inspected its towers and responded that there was an issue with lightning impacting one of its towers.
But Flato told the Herald that Verizon did not have an issue with lightning striking its towers over the summer.
Another resident in the Falls Creek area, Nancy Henry, was an AT&T customer who switched to Verizon specifically to improve the quality of service she was receiving.
Initially Henry said her Verizon service was good, but since the end of May, she has noticed a decline in service.
“I’d be trying to have a conversation with my brother, and it would just continually drop the call,” Henry said. “Finally, I just gave up and went to our house phone.”
Henry said she had some trouble getting a clear answer out of Verizon as to why the service was so poor. At one point, she said Verizon told her it was because the company was transitioning to its 5G service.
Flato told the Herald the troubles customers are experiencing are not related to 5G.
“They couldn’t give me a direct answer,” Henry said “I told them that it was really dramatic the drop in quality of service, and that was the reason I had moved to Verizon.
Flato said Verizon plans to install a new tower in the Hermosa area to better handle the high volume of usage the company says it is experiencing in the valley and causing the service issues.
“Our goal is to maintain or improve quality of service day in and day out,” Flato said.
La Plata County spokesman Ted Holteen said he is unaware of any plans Verizon has submitted to construct a new cell site.
“We are not aware of anything like that,” Holteen said. “Nothing is legally being applied for or constructed at this time.”
njohnson@durangoherald.com
