the area of each cell typically increases when you move out to sparsely populated areas with vast expanses of land. thereby, minimizing number of handovers (cell-to-cell) that might be happening.
Aye, but that is what creates the "distance from tower" problem of getting poor signal quality due to normal attenuation over distance and the larger number potential shadow/interference causing things between the tower and you.
There are a number of places where trains skip around at a goodly speed in what is probably a packed area by way of phone cells, so there will sometimes be a significant number of cell-to-cell hand-offs. Having said that, as I grew up (well, more-or-less) before mobile phones were common I'm still slightly impressed that the whole cell hand-over thing works at all mid-call at 80+mph so maybe they are not much of an issue unless the destination cell is already saturated at the time.
