Turning up the transmitter power is a good way to insure that more cellphones, farther away, can hear the base station. But it doesn't to anything to help the base station hear the cellphones that are farther away. The only way to increase the coverage range reciprocally is to do something with the antenna. But that's a catch-22 . . . a higher-gain antenna has a narrower beam-width. So it works farther out, but only through a narrower 'window' of directions.