NEW YORK -- Do you lose your cell phone calls at the same intersection over and over again?

FeedRoom Video Where Are Cell Phone Dead Zones?

Consumer reporter Roseanne Colletti looked into where you may encounter problems in New York City and what you can expect from some of the biggest providers.

It's a question of capacity versus volume of calls. There are an estimated 180 million cell phones out there already and growing at a rate of 6 to 7 percent a year. NewsChannel 4 looked into some of the locations where consumers have complained they have trouble with calls.

Some consumers have logged their complaints with an online watchdog group called Deadcellzones.com. The Web site started as a small database in Los Angeles six years ago.

"It's grown over the last six years to almost 15,000 locations across the United States, and the concept is just to provide an open database, an open platform by which people can complain about where their cell phone doesn't work," said Jeff Cohn, CEO of Deadcellzones.com.

For example, the site lists 19 Cingular problem locations scattered around the five boroughs of New York, 46 for Sprint -- mostly in Staten Island -- while Verizon has 40, again mostly in Staten Island.

In general, the providers dismiss most of the Web site data as "outdated."

"Just in the last eight months, we've lit up over 200 new cell sites, so it may be difficult for a Web site like that to keep up with an ever changing picture like that," said Rob Fleissner, of Cingular Wireless.

"Sprint added more than 100 sites in the metro area last year, and so that might have taken care of a lot of those areas," Sprint's Lisa Ihde Malloy said.

"The information on there isn't tremendously useful to us as a carrier, because it lacks the information that we could use to make improvements," Gian Dagama, of Verizon Wireless said.

The providers insist they rely on their on mobile monitoring systems.

Dagama said Verizon has a vehicle that "collects data on our network and our competition while making phone calls back to our home office. The equipment tells us where active calls were either dropped or someone wasn't able to place a call."

NewsChannel 4 asked Verizon to test a Manhattan address that popped up on the Deadcellzone site -- 50th Street, between Madison and 5th Avenue.

"The call, as you know, went through just fine, and I'm assuming that if there was a problem there at some other time, that may have been caused by a temporary problem with our network," Dagama said.

Cingular told NewsChannel 4 it had checked 14 locations on the list and in three cases, agreed with the data on the Web site -- two on Staten Island, one on Lyndale Avenue near Amboy Road , another on Todt Hill and Willow Pond Roads. The third was in Brooklyn Heights at Willow and Pierrepont Streets.

"I would say three out of the 14 are places where we're currently working on new cell sites to improve coverage for our customers in those areas," Fleissner said.

Sprint told NewsChannel 4 it was looking into three Bronx locations named on the Web site -- Briggs Avenue at 196th Street, 201st St. and Balcom Avenue and Omstead and Lacombe.

"We need to visit that site, we need to place some phone calls, check the signal strength," Malloy said.

Regarding the relatively high number of complaints logged onto the Web site about Staten Island, both Sprint and Verizon acknowledge they have had coverage issues there. Both providers said they have been upgrading their systems there extensively in recent weeks.