Can you hear me now? Verizon tester logs 25,000 miles a year.

• Author: Fulford, Martha
• Position: High tech Colorado biz

GARY FANKHAUSER DOESN'T WALK around with a phone asking, "Can you hear me now?" Instead, eight phones make automatic calls from the back of his Ford Explorer, using both male and female voices and a set of phrases that contain the most often-used vowel and consonant sounds from cell-phone conversation.

So it's more like, "He carved a head from a round block of marble," or, "These days a chicken leg is a rare dish."

But Fankhauser still is the Verizon man of the region.

Verizon Wireless network and Fankhauser's job inspired the ubiquitous "Can you hear me now?" advertising campaign. Fankhauser drives 25,000 miles a year testing Verizon's network signal--and its competitors.'

"I'm pretty much a customer or act like one," Fankhauser says. "What I'm seeing is what our customers are seeing." He is one of 60 Verizon network testers across the nation.

And testing nationally is not inexpensive. In addition to his bank of eight phones making 1,400 calls a day, each around 2 minutes long, Fankhauser's car has 14 antennae, a global-positioning system and one or two laptop computers that collect data from the phones. His car cost the company $300,000 to equip, and it gets continual upgrades to test new technology made available to customers. The most recent upgrade cost $50,000.

In a month, Fankhauser will be testing camera phones as Verizon invests $150 million in Colorado to add new coverage areas, picture messaging and wireless Internet access.

For two weeks out of each month, he drives across the entire state of Colorado, as far south as Farmington, N.M., and three quarters of the state of Wyoming.

"Mostly what I drive is the major interstates and the highly populated highways," Fankhauser said.

To calculate a baseline and compare Verizon's service to its competitors, Fankhauser returns to the office to compile the data he collects while on the move. He creates maps that show weak areas and where dropped calls occur, so that Verizon's engineers can continue to improve the network. Fankhauser's tests mainly address...