12 December 2010

Lucky us

Rico says the headline at Techland says it all: Consumer Reports Names AT&T Worst Wireless Service Provider
The article is no comfort, either:
The January 2011 issue of Consumer Reports hits the newsstands tomorrow and features the results from a survey of 58,000 readers regarding the overall levels of satisfaction with their respective cell phone service providers.
AT&T ranks lowest among U.S. carriers and, according to Consumer Reports, "was the only one to drop significantly in overall satisfaction" since last year. Of the AT&T users surveyed, "over half" used an iPhone.
Verizon has historically taken the top spot pretty regularly but was actually beaten out by U.S. Cellular this year. Also of note, Sprint "pulled even in overall satisfaction with Verizon" this time around, which is a pretty big win for Sprint considering it tied with AT&T for worst service provider last year.
AT&T responded with the following statement:
"We take this seriously and we continually look for new ways to improve the customer experience. The fact is wireless customers have choices and a record number of them chose AT&T in the third quarter, significantly more than our competitors. Hard data from independent drive tests confirms AT&T has the nation's fastest mobile broadband network with our nearest competitor twenty percent slower on average nationwide and our largest competitor sixty percent slower on average nationwide. And our dropped call rate is within 1/10 of a percent, the equivalent of just one call in a thousand, of the industry leader."
The related article adds injury to insult:
The story goes something like this. Back in 2007, USA Today published an article that said, “AT&T has exclusive U.S. distribution rights for five years” concerning the iPhone. That information proved to be difficult to officially verify and since the first iPhone hit the market, it seems that we've been hearing rumor after rumor that Verizon would get a CDMA version of the handset, even though the supposed AT&T deal would make that impossible.
Now Engadget has apparently dug up old court documents from 2007 that detail the agreement between AT&T and Apple and, yes, it's a five-year deal. That would mean that assuming nothing has changed, the end of the world may come before (or shortly after) Verizon sees its own iPhone.
And while it's not out of the realm of possibility that Apple and AT&T may have changed the terms of the agreement between 2007 and today, it certainly wouldn't have been AT&T's idea, and it'd be nearly impossible to get that information out of Apple unless one of its employees accidentally leaves the agreement in a bar somewhere.
When contacted for comment, AT&T's response was pretty typical: “We have a great relationship with Apple. We don't comment on the specifics of our relationship.” Are they just friends? More than friends? Who is Apple going to ask to the prom? The suspense is killing me!

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