A drive around town asking, 'Can you hear me now?'

"Can you hear me now? Good."

Thought it was just an advertising gimmick? Well, think again.

Verizon Wireless' famous ad campaign is based on real-life testers who drive across the country monitoring signal strength. William Madden, baseline technician for the Verizon Wireless Philadelphia Tri-State network, said that he only uses the ubiquitous phrase when he takes people on test drives.

Data collected by these testers led to the construction of a new cell site in Princeton Borough and, more recently, one on campus.

"I think [the new University tower] was more for coverage than capacity, because we had relatively good coverage here, but on the campus we didn't," Madden said during a drive around campus. "It may have been some people called customer service and said we want to make calls in our rooms."

Whatever the reason, University students with Verizon Wireless plans have greatly benefited since the addition of the tower in January 2006.

"It's great now," Wenli Cai '09 said. "I have all the bars and I don't have a problem anymore, inside or outside."

Madden covers 4,000 miles per quarter in a Chevrolet TrailBlazer equipped with technology worth $330,000, including a laptop computer, cell phones and extensive software.

In the back of the car, eight phones on eight different networks continuously place phone calls to monitor signal quality and count the number of ineffective calls and dropped calls.

Along with testing their own signal, Verizon Wireless tests the signals of its four major competitors, Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile and Nextel, one of which had significant trouble placing phone calls on campus. Madden, however, wouldn't say which call module corresponded to which network.

The laptop logs the number of placed calls, ineffective calls, dropped calls and successful calls, as well as signal strength and the number of different antenna faces that transmit signals to the Verizon Wireless digital cell phone.

Instead of the famous "Can you hear me now?" Verizon uses Harvard sentences — phonetically-balanced sentences developed by electrical engineers — to test signal quality. These special sentences use specific phonemes at the same rate they appear in English. Phonemes are classifications of various sound modulations in human speech.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Harvard sentences such as "These days a leg of chicken is a rare dish" and "She has a smart way of wearing clothing," sound from the back of the test vehicle every time the cells phones place calls.

Verizon Wireless also has backup power on its towers so that power outages will not affect cell phone coverage. It supplied Florida and Louisiana with phones and extra capacity during the hurricanes and provided the Live 8 concert with extra capacity.

"Our network is the most reliable," Madden said. "We think we have the best technology and all that, but we provide backup power on all our cell towers and all the switches."

"When we say we're reliable, we're reliable," Carla Reinas, a publicist for Verizon Wireless, said on the test drive.