One of the most successful advertising campaigns in the cell phone industry's brief history is the one featuring a Verizon service person roaming from town to town, asking, "Can you hear me now?"

Well, that's not entirely fiction. In Western Pennsylvania, Sue Godlewski is Verizon's baseline technician who roams around to find out where the signals are strong and weak -- although she does it in a truck, not by foot.

It's part of a more defined effort that Verizon and other cell phone companies perform to continue to build out the capabilities of their networks. Sue travels a pre-mapped route to collect data about where signals are strong and where they are not.

Driving a vehicle equipped with more than $250,000 in communications and computer gear, she monitors Verizon's cellular network, taking samples using two lines -- one taking inbound calls and one making outbound calls to see where the calls can be completed and where they get dropped.

She also monitors six competing cellular carriers. Then she sends the statistics back to the corporate offices, where they use her input to determine where and how to upgrade the network.

When you have a problem with your cell phone that may indicate a performance issue with a cell site, a performance engineer looks through the call logs and goes on site when needed to determine whether there is equipment trouble.

Using these processes to map its strategy, Verizon spent a quarter-billion dollars last year upgrading its network in Pennsylvania. That includes installation of new cell sites, which cost $200,000 to $1 million each; installation of the company's higher-speed Internet access service; and increased capacity on existing cell sites.