Lowell-area AT&T customers will notice faster service

03/23/2016 01:54:16 PM EDT

Lowell-area AT&T customers will notice faster service
by Grant Welker

LOWELL -- AT&T cellphone customers now have faster service in the Lowell area as the wireless provider spends $575 million upgrading its equipment across the state. 

Company representatives gathered Wednesday with state Rep. Tom Golden, a Lowell Democrat who chairs the Legislature's Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utility and Energy. Standing across the street from a 85-foot cellphone tower on Tanner Street, Patricia Jacobs, the president of AT&T New England, said the company has been adding equipment across Massachusetts to improve service for customers. 

State Rep. Tom Golden and
AT&T New England President Patricia Jacobs
outside the company's new cellphone antennas
on Tanner Street in Lowell Wednesday

AT&T added antennas and radios at the Tanner Street tower in October, and to a tower off Andover Street in Tewksbury by the Lowell line in January. 

Adding the two new towers to its network fills in what were before spotty areas of 4G LTE service for AT&T customers. The Tanner Street tower has enough capacity to handle 300 hours of voice traffic every day and the data equivalent of 59,000 daily song downloads, the company says. 

The new capacity was the result of work with public officials to invest not only in older copper-wire networks but wireless networks that need to be able to handle more downloads and streaming all the time, Jacobs said. 

"It's a real partnership on all levels," she said. 

Golden called adequate cellphone coverage important, especially as more people move away from using landlines.

"People need to recognize that this doesn't just happen by accident," he said of wireless coverage.

"In this part of Massachusetts, we take it for granted."

AT&T leases space on cellphone towers such as the Tanner Street one, which also carries equipment for two other wireless providers, the company said.