By Olivia Scheck
DNAinfo Reporter Producer
MANHATTAN — New York might be the media capital of the world, but it's a terrible place to make a cell phone call, data from the Nielsen Company showed.
After making 140,000 test calls throughout the city and surrounding suburbs, the data service found that almost 3 percent of calls dropped, a greater percetage than dropped in Chicago, Dallas or Seattle, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Dead zones are so common in the city that one Manhattanite, Stephanie Taylor, 34, told the Journal that she goes out of her way to avoid certain areas.
"It can be so horrible here," Taylor told the paper. "I have to pick my cab routes so my calls don't drop."
In the future, she might want to avoid the West Side Highway, where service cut out for Nielsen testers on eight occasions, according to a data map provided by the Journal.
Another problematic stretch for AT&T customers is 59th Street. The carrier divides their Manhattan coverage into two networks, with 59th Street as the border, causing calls to drop as cell phone users traverse the street, the Journal said.
Mike Maus, an AT&T employee who oversees service for New York and northern New Jersey, blamed Manhattan landlords for the sub-par service.
"Outside Manhattan, you can have one landlord for a few hundred sites, but that's just not the case here," Maus explained to the Journal.
AT&T had around 650 cell sites on the island, each of them attached to a different landlord, the paper claimed.
While the Nielsen data did not differentiate between carriers, AT&T admitted that their coverage within the city had not met the company's standards, adding that they expected to reach that goal this summer, to the delight of many iPhone users, according to the Journal.
