We all know it and we all dread it. The blank bars at the top of our phone screens condemning our efforts of communication to failure.

Losing cell service is a common occurrence in Lake Forest, especially in the town square. The unreliable cell service in this well-loved area of our city is an undeniable issue many residents and students at LFHS have noticed in recent years. 

The lack of cell service poses a myriad of problems such as: not being able to pre-order your pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks, unintentionally leaving your mom on read, or being unable to access your digital gift card that your great aunt sent you. 

Most of the time, I can’t even play music in my car once I hit the middle of Lake Forest, because the data doesn’t carry.

After experiencing some of these situations as a result of poor cell service, I began to wonder, why is this happening in Lake Forest? I haven’t experienced a fraction of these issues in nearby suburbs, so what sets our community apart?

Apparently, cell carriers such as T-Mobile and AT&T have lower results of disruption in Lake Forest, in comparison to Verizon, which had the highest rates of disruption.

Signal Checker, a program that analyzes and informs on the levels of effectiveness of cell service in different cities, displayed that Verizon and Visible do not have 5G coverage, whereas T-Mobile and AT&T offer some (limited) 5G coverage in Lake Forest. 

There are three registered cell towers bringing cellular data to the citizens in the Lake Forest/Lake Bluff area, along with smaller towers not registered in the database. These towers are spread throughout the city, between three to five miles of one another.

However, there is not a tower on file in uptown Lake Forest or near LFHS. 

In densely populated areas where there are many people using cellular at the same, cell towers can cover about as low of a radius as half of a mile. Perhaps then a lack of cell towers could be contributing to the cell service issues that Lake Forest is experiencing.

If this is the case, it unfortunately may be a difficult problem to solve.

The average cost of installing a cell tower is around $175,000 and full completion of the installation can take up to three months. However, although it’s a costly undertaking there are a lot of upsides that come with better cell service, for example, it can raise the real estate value of certain areas. 

While there is still more information to uncover regarding the source of Lake Forest’s cellular issues, the absence of large cell towers is most likely significantly contributing to the problem and should be explored further.

The more people are made aware of the cellular issues Lake Forest is facing, the more resources we could collect to address it.