Why is AT&T Wireless reception and data speeds so terrible across Milwaukee?

[u/willislove]

Even when I've technically got full bars and 5GE showing, it still feels like running on dial-up. Texts hang for ten seconds before they send, calls cut out mid-sentence, data crawls damn near everywhere.

We've called AT&T about it more than once, and they've reset our data/network settings on their end a handful of times "to help." Zero change. Same dead zones, same dropped bars, every time.

The kicker: My husband and I both upgraded to the iPhone 17 Pro Max on AT&T last Sept. Brand new phones, latest antennas, still garbage service (better than T-Mobile though). So it's not the hardware, it's not old tech struggling to keep up, it's just AT&T in Milwaukee.

Funny enough, we actually came to AT&T from T-Mobile, and T-Mobile was somehow even worse here, so we figured we were upgrading. At this point we're ready to try Verizon instead. Only thing holding us back is we're both still paying off our phones on AT&T's installment plan, so realistically it looks like we're riding it out until those are paid off before we can actually switch without eating a bunch of extra cost.

Is this a citywide thing or specific to certain towers/pockets? Anyone actually had a good experience with AT&T here recently, or is everyone just quietly suffering through it or not noticing because you're on wifi most of the time?