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The merger of AT&T Wireless and Cingular means Verizon is no longer the easy bet when it comes to great cell phone coverage in the UCLA area.

For years, Verizon has offered expensive but consistently reliable service. These plans offer fewer minutes per dollar and their phone selection has been more limited, but the company has also offered the best-performing network.

Now, with the AT&T Wireless and Cingular networks combined, that lead in performance has been cut.

If Cingular is able to match Verizon in terms of network performance, picking a phone will suddenly be more about features and price than the ability to make a call from the depths of some UCLA basement.

Since the merger, I have observed and spoken with several AT&T and Cingular customers making calls on campus or around Westwood in areas they said were previously dead spots for them.

Cingular regional spokesperson Lauren Garner said the company added a cell site to the UCLA area in the last year and planned to add two additional sites soon. She also said engineers would look at the combined network and evaluate which areas had overlapping coverage.

Another result of the merger is that T-Mobile and Cingular will eventually end their current antenna-sharing relationship. Garner said Cingular will officially sell part of its network to T-Mobile on Jan. 5, but that the sharing agreement would continue for four years. The end result will probably not affect the average Cingular user – by the time the sharing agreement ends, Cingular plans to have added new antennas operating exclusively under its own name.

Verizon representative Ken Muche said his company spends about a billion dollars every 90 days to improve its network and that the UCLA area had seen roughly a doubling of capacity in the last two years.

For its part, Sprint PCS said it too had improved coverage. Viki Soares, a regional representative for Sprint, said the company does not have specific plans to respond to the merger. But she said Sprint had upgraded its existing cell sites in the UCLA area over the past couple of years and would continue to add capacity to its network.

The promises of the various company representatives should be taken with a grain of salt, but anecdotal evidence suggests that all of the companies have, in fact, improved coverage in the last couple of years.

And adding new antennas is not the only way to boost coverage. The phones themselves matter. I recently bought a new Verizon phone – the v710 – which allowed me to make calls from inside several campus buildings which are dead spots for many other phones.

The fact that all the networks have improved means users should pay close attention to other aspects of the service – such as features and cost. One of the most important new features is Bluetooth phone-to-phone networking. The Bluetooth protocol allows phones to directly sync their stored phone book lists with computers, transfer pictures and use wireless microphone headsets – all without a cable.

At the moment, AT&T, Cingular and T-Mobile offer by far the widest range of Bluetooth phones. They also offer the smallest number of restrictions on what you can do with the Bluetooth transfer capability. Many of these GSM phones allow you to freely move data between your phone and your computer or PDA.

Soares said Sprint would soon release a phone with Bluetooth capability – but she also said Sprint expects users to share pictures and data via the Sprint network, which, unlike the Bluetooth feature, is not free. At the moment, Verizon’s only Bluetooth phone requires the use of a similar system. Verizon and Sprint apparently want to make users buy a data plan if they want to use their phone for anything other than making simple phone calls.

On Nov. 15, Cingular will release a new lineup of phones and service plans. Students should carefully compare features like Bluetooth, free in-network calling and price when those plans come out – the new options may or may not be compelling.

In the long run, the end result of increased competition will probably be lower prices for users, or at least more options. And students who previously stuck with Verizon because of its strong network should consider looking at the GSM offerings to see if their networks are now up to par.

Lazzaro is a fourth-year political science and psychology student and editorial development director for the Daily Bruin. E-mail him at dlazzaro@media.ucla.edu.