Some of those fake tree towers are hilariously half-assed. There was one near a road that was part of a regular loop we'd do near Mission in BC that stuck out even more for how bad it looked:
As for Canadian cell service, while there's obviously massive room for improvement, comparisons to countries with wildly different population densities and weather complexities is a bit unfair. Canada has a double problem in that we do have some regions of high density which are significantly more profitable than coverage in places like Northern Ontario.
Dead spots happen everywhere, and sometimes it's just luck of the draw. We lived in a condo at one time that had intermittent terrible service. It turned out that we were actually too close to the tower, but on the wrong side of the building. Every time an elevator went by, it blocked the signal as we were in its shadow, and the call would drop. Infuriating, but a difficult problem to solve, as you'd have to build another tower just for a single unit on each of a few floors of one building. We only figured this out by using a website that mapped mobile service, towers, and coverage complaints.
Don't get me wrong: the big telecoms mostly make insane profits and have lots of room for improvement. Having done contracting work for two of the big three cell companies, I can also say that anyone who thinks business is automatically more efficient than government hasn't dealt with the beauraucratic insanity within any massive corporation. But Canada has unique geographical challenges that add significantly to the problem...
