Well Chicago is not the biggest city but it’s ranked the third largest city behind NYC and LA. With all the new technology for iPhone 5 or the Samsung 3S, that can do anything from taking panorama photos, or bumping phones to transfer photos, they can’t do the most essential thing a phone suppose to do, make a phone call. These big phone company like Verizon or AT&T that promote their services and push these fancy phones, but in a city with many high raises, you can’t even get reception. It’s not just me but most of the people I talked to living in the city, have crappy reception no matter what top tier phone carrier they have.
Living in a city with bad reception, I had to resort to installing app to my phone like Google Voice, Google Chat, Talkatone, Skype, mighty text and I have MagicJack to communicate for both business and personal. I basically only use my data to make call and send or receive text messages and for my last month phone bill, I only used less then 80 minutes of my anytime minutes. I’m sure my friends wouldn’t want to list my contact in case of an emergency because they won’t have room to write all my numbers on one line.
That’s weird.. I live in Chicago and I have excellent reception. 5 bars all the time! 4 every once in a while. It’s probably because you’re coming from LA. You should turn your phone off for maybe like 5 hours and give it time to adapt to your new location. That should help the problem. My friend had the same problem after coming from a vacation to India, but once he left it off for half a day, it was normal by the time he turned it back on. I hope this helps your big problems! 🙂