cell phone drama....

We just signed a new contract with AT&T in February. We've been with them for over 4.5 years and have never had a problem with them... until now.
When we're in our house in AZ, we get no service, at all, none. Every once in a while a call will actually get thru, but you can't really hear the person on the other end and 9 times out of 10, it drops the call. Most of the time our phones give us a message that says "Emergency calls only". As soon as you get out of our neighborhood, the phones work fine. We went to Best Buy and an AT&T store here, and both have told us, yes, you live in a dead area, but they can't help us get out of our contract. When we call AT&T customer service, we get the full run-around. We called them from the AT&T store today, and had the guy at the store tell someone there that we are in fact, in a dead area, and Mark talked to at least 5 different people in 5 different departments before we got frustrated and hung up - a good 40 mins after being on hold with them. They keep telling us that we have to submit a request to have the termination fees ($165 per phone) waived after we cancel the contract. We don't want to cancel the contract until we know for sure we're not going to have to pay $330 to get out of it.
The whole situation is frustrating and we're not quite sure what to do about it. The customer service people keep telling us we're in a "moderate coverage area". Their definition of "moderate" is that the phones work fine outside in open areas, away from buildings. Ironically though, I don't want to have to go stand out in the middle of the street every time I need to make a call, especially when it doesn't even work out there half the time. They also said that based on our call log, we get service, but again, ironically, we don't sit in our house 24/7, and it works perfectly fine outside the neighborhood. I guess our only option is to switch providers and pray to God that they don't charge us the termination fees. Grrr....