Wow.So many mistakes.

Depending on where you are at, cell towers up here are widely spaced apart in the backwater places. The metro places have cell towers closer because they have to handle much, much more users, not because they are digital.

How far the radio will cover is based upon many things. Frequancy, power out, antennia design, antenna height, and any loss of power from the radio to the antenna, all effect how much coverage a radio will have. This was a test, where they didn't care about covering a larger area.

Things that affect digital is the codecs, bandwidth, error correction. To be clear though, we are talking about digital voice. Analog voice can be heard longer distances, because of two things. One is the signal degrades slowly. Two is the mind has a remarkable ability to pull the voice out of noise. Digital on the otherhand is remains clear for longer distance, then hits a cliff, because the radio correct the errors. It is past this point analog is still readable.

Digital data, and Morse code can be understood at further distances. Some amature radio digital communication can be decoded even when the signal is below the noise floor.

So let them test, at least they didn't do a major switch first.