Consumer Reports: Best cell phone service?
December 3rd, 2008, 9:19 am · 9 Comments · posted by Tamara Chuang, a.k.a. The Gadgetress
Verizon is the best cell phone company out there, with T-Mobile a close second. Who says so? The majority of 51,700 readers surveyed in September by Consumer Reports, one of the most consistently consumer-centric organizations in the nation.
In a new report, available in the January 2009 issue, cell phone companies are no longer considered unreliable as 60 percent of readers said they were “completely satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their cellular service — a category that had previously been among the worst rated by consumers. About 42 percent said they had no major complaints with their cell-phone company, which is up from 29 percent in CR’s previous survey.
However, in Orange County (Los Angeles area), the ratings for all the companies aren’t that great overall:
Locally, Verizon still ranks at the top among readers and connectivity. And while T-Mobile is the worst for connectivity, readers ranked it the second highest. In reader ratings, all scored above 60, which CR defines as “fairly well satisfied.”
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Overall, the industry scored such high praise thanks to some big changes, such as improving call quality and having less onerous contract terms. Pretty much all offer pro-rated contracts now.
But still, the big complaint was cost.
The free phone, or deeply discounted one, also may not be such a big bargain. Companies manage to make quite a bit of money back on the monthly fees. For example, about $4.50 of a Sprint subscriber’s monthly bill in 2007 was devoted to repaying Sprint back for the phone — a detail CR unearthed in Sprint’s U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission filings. Over two years, that’s $108.
Worse, even after the phone is paid off, the monthly bill doesn’t decrease. Hence, “consumers continue paying for the phone as long as they hold onto it,” says CR.
(Other CR findings: $2.55 of Alltel’s monthly bill was for equipment while T-Mobile charged $3.29. AT&T and Verizon bury their figures, but both companies told CR their fee was similar to the $5/month reduction of their early termination fees.)
As for the best quality service? Verizon hands down. It not only won the hearts of its subscribers but it also won a case against AT&T for better service. CR says AT&T no longer runs two of its “More bars in more places” ads depicting better service indoors, after Verizon cried foul.
It’s a good report (the online version ranks phones, the print version includes service) that comes one week before I publish my own series of cell-phone stories. I’m researching the costs of family plans, pre-paid plans and who has the cheapest cell phone service period. Stay tuned for all that next week. In the meantime, feel free to e-mail me or comment below with any questions or concerns about cell phone services and prices.
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Connectivity is the reason to have cellular service. With T-Mobile, connectivity is a huge weakness. T-Mobile sucks.
I am glad that ATT finally got called out on “more bars in more places”. Orange County is one of the most populated regions of CA, which then by our population numbers arguably makes it one of the most populated regions in the country (obviously behind the major metropolitan areas of the US). However, I consistently drop calls and have little to no service. Their phone selection is terrible. You basically have the choice of an outdated free brick, a blackberry or an iphone. After you pick the more contemporary phone (blackberry or iphone) you are stuck paying massive service fees. The only reason that ATT is not last in that list of the big four providers is because sprint is bankrupt and irrelevant in the wireless market. Moral of the story…NEVER SIGN A CONTRACT WITH ATT
T-Mobile cellular service is horrible (Orange County). Phone selection is primative. Website is almost useless. I keep T-Mobile because of the usually great tech service.
at&t is by far the worst cell phone providers the way they bill people is crazy and costly.if it wasent for being on my fiends plan i realy dont think i would pay my bill do to its out standing charges
My problem started with my initial visit to the Sprint store…I was attracted to the “everything for $99″ plan with unlimited texting, including media attachments. It seems the “superior” knowledge that Sprint touts didn’t make its way to the store that I shopped in. Very nice people don’t get me wrong, but they didn’t know much about their service. I opted for the Blackberry Curve which I had had with At&T and liked. Sprint customer service apparently wasn’t aware of compatibility issues Blackberry’s have on their network with regard to text attachment support.
I am a huge text geek. On AT&T I used it all of the time and I often attach pics I take with my phone so I can share them immediately with my friends. I am also a dog walker and often take pictures of the dogs that I am with to send to clients. It’s a feel-good thing that my customers clearly like.
So now I’m on Sprint. I take a picture and then go to send it and my phone won’t let me. I didn’t really think anything about it but placed a call to customer service to see what I was doing wrong. What I was told was that the “phone” uses a different platform and doesn’t support attachments with texts. They didn’t mention that this was a Blackberry problem and I assumed that it was a problem with all phones which kind of surprised me. At no time did anyone say to me, “oh, it’s an issue with Blackberry, if texting with attachments is important to you we would suggest switching phones.”
Frankly, I think it’s rather misleading that Sprint would promote a plan that wouldn’t be completely supported by every phone, but that’s a different story altogether.
Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I talked to four different customer service reps, each inadequately acquainted with their services plans and Blackberry compatibility issues and one downright rude — as if it was an imposition for me to want to be able to utilize all of the features of the plan. Finally out of exasperation I decided to see if I could email Dan Hesse, Sprint CEO, since he is the one in the commercials who is advertising their superior customer service, their superior knowledge that the reps possess and the joys and wonders of the everything plan.
To his credit, I got an email back pretty much right away from “Towanda H”, 1-757-223-3196, who reached me through “dan@srint.com”. She was very apologetic and after some discussion she clarified that it wasn’t an “everything” service per se and that many of the phones they sold didn’t support certain features of the “everything” plan (so why don’t they tell you this). Some don’t support the GPS service, some don’t allow text attachments etc., etc. She suggested that since I hadn’t been a Sprint customer all that long (2 months at this point), she would try to exchange my Blackberry for a phone that supported all of the features and I would pay the difference — something I was absolutely fine with. She would need to get final approval from her superiors since I was out of the 30 day return period. Four days later she left a message on my voice mail saying that she was sorry but she wouldn’t be able to accommodate me because I was out of the 30 day return period and that Sprint would like to thank me for my business and if I had any other issues that she could help me with to please don’t hesitate to contact her. I emailed her and told her that I felt as if I was the one being penalized for the ignorance of their customer service reps — and an inferior network: after all, Blackberry text attachments was a service fully supported by AT&T. Again she wrote back saying she was sorry but thanks again for my business.
Unbelievable on so many levels. Bad service, false advertising, bad business policies in general, inferior network technology. So I am determined to post every day until my contract runs out (about a year and 9 months) to different blogs expressing my disgust with them. You make your customers happy. It’s just that simple.
SEND AN ATTACHMENT
Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Palm OS use a similar process for attaching a file to an outgoing email message. You compose a message and then select a file to attach to it. On the iPhone it works the other way around. You open an application that can work with the file and use that application to create the email. For example, if you want to send a photo to a friend, you would open the Photo application, select a photo, tap it, and then tap the Email Photo option. The email application will open with a blank email message that already has the photo attached.
How can you rate T-Mobile at being second best when the stats show it clearly has the worst connectivity. I have a T-Mobile Wing with Internet and the service gets worse by the month. There system is so slow and overloaded that the phone can no longer open up web pages without the page timing out. What is T-Mobile’s support answer to this problem, the common lie is the towers in your area are being upgraded and the service will get better in a couple days. The same lie I’ve been hearing for ten months now.
In the last 5 years, I have had verizon, t-mobile, and At&t. Verizon and t-mobile had the worst service. For the first few months, I had the best service with verizon and t-mobile; however, after that I had horrible, horrible service. I could not use the phone in Pittsburgh. So I switched to At&t, and I have great service. However, I seem to have bad luck with phones from at&t.
i have sprint and its awsome!!!!!!!!
the stuff ur sayin doesnt even sound true wtf