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Consumer Reports: Cingular, Sprint Bad Performers
dcgirl20006 writes "It's that time again, Consumer Reports is out with the annual cell phone review. And Verizon has risen to the top. And, Cingular, with the most subscribers (post AT&T mega merger), claims it is the company with the "least dropped calls" but consumers say otherwise. What can be done? Provide risk-free 30 day trial period; realistic coverage maps, upfront price disclosure, and end early termination fees."
In spite of their mathematically challenged service reps, Verizon has always been a pretty good company for me. In Atlanta, the coverage is excellent and their prices and plans are fantastic.
I originally switched primarily because Verizon was one of a very, very few companies that refused to participate in and spoke out against the cell phone directory telemarketer's dream scheme a while back. It was pretty heavily covered by our consumer rights media guru here, Clark Howard (second entry). It also helps that most of my family is on Verizon and I can now call them for free.
And, for what it's worth, they did finally concede that $.002 is different from .002. :-)
Unless things change pretty dramatically, I'll probably stick with them for a long time to come.
I'm not sure about any reports that categorize what is basically a nation-wide business that really exists in terms of local regions, in this case, cell towers. I've used T-Mobile since Voicestream was the originator (actually, since day one of Voicestream) and I've been ecstatic about their coverage in the regions I travel in. For me, this is all that matters. I hear about horror stories with T-Mobile from others -- but their regions are different. For me to use a national consumer report for a company that exists for me mostly on a local level is really short-sighted.
I do like Consumer Reports and I think they do carry weight in their expertise in terms of national products on a national level -- cars, consumer equipment, home equipment, etc. I won't buy a car or a washer or a TV without at least reviewing what CR has to say. But if CR was to try to shoehorn local service into a nation-wide review, I don't think I would consider it trustworthy. For that, I'd contact people in the region and see what they use.
My father recently switched from T-Mobile to Cingular and he is actually happier -- better coverage in HIS region (objective), conversation quality seems better (subjective), and he hasn't had one dropped call versus T-Mobile dropping about 5% of the calls in HIS region. But in my area, Cingular is terrible.
Sure, the report (for subscribers) offers some city-wide ratings, but again it is too generic to really understand or use as a relevant way to pick a carrier. Also, it is important to realize that while "nationwide" can be broken down in multiple ways, it is still an overall general region. The Chicago area that I live in totals about 30 regions from urban to suburban to exurban to rural -- and all of them are rarely used by the same user. For a cell phone user, talking to me (in the burbs) means little if they live in farmland, so why would they care what the overall national service quality is when what matters most is what others in their region use and are happy with?
I am a fan of CR and other free market regulators (they offer opinions, you are free to choose based on that variety of opinion out there), but in this case I think they fall short of need. I do like them in terms of rating customer service, which is definitely NOT region-based or specific to one local market, but produces a reliable review of the company as a whole. I think that is where CR shines: in terms of letting us know about specific problems with their customer service center or with their contracts or with their pricing schemes. But in terms of overall reliability, I think this is more aggregation where aggregation is not appropriate or even considered valid.
I won't ever switch to Cingular myself because of two reasons:
1. I've had friends who have had terrible luck with their call center for help.
2. Bad contracts as compared to other cell phone manufacturers.
T-Mobile has the best customer retention department imaginable, and they seem to care because of the follow-up calls I've received. I also love their handset replacement plan as well as their optional insurance plan which I've used twice in 5 years. T-Mobile has made sure I am never without a working phone, and when I have had problems, they've worked to fix it. For me, that is still secondary to knowing what works in what markets/regions that I use, and CR just isn't appropriate for that purpose.
Sidenotes:
Early termination fees are VERY important when you're getting a $200-$300 handset "for free." Just returning the handset does not cover the commission paid to the dealer.
Upfront price disclosure is important, but it really should be up to the buyer-side of the transaction to understand what they're getting into. If you're not sure, ask a friend to help you.
Realstic coverage maps: What is realistic? I've never seen a coverage map that is consistently right -- things change, and conditions can be effected by new construction or even weather conditions. They can al
As a somewhat happy Verizon user, I can't deny that their COVERAGE is simply fantastic.
That being said, I feel that their disabling of their phones is ridiculous. The Motorola E815 that I purchased has numerous features that have either been disabled or crippled. Sure I can hack it, but that's not the point. It's one of the few reasons I have considered switching to someone with a more open policy regarding usage. Also, I pay significantly more than my friends/family that use Cingular/Sprint.
I use Cingular- but I think they are a bunch of asshats, and I'm currently looking for a company to switch to.
About 2 years ago they started telling me that I need to upgrade my SIM card. They kept sending me new ones in the mail- none of which worked.
Finally I went into the store, and got the new card. I was assured that it would improve my reception. Okay, cool, nothing wrong with that. (it would switch me from their older system to the new one they bought from AT&T)
Now I can't use my phone in my house, or even in my backyard. Previously this worked perfectly. So I called Cingular and talked to the customer service person.
"Well sir, that's impossible. The new SIM card is supposed to improve your reception..."
Great, but it doesn't. After 10 minutes of me insisting that it got worse, she shuffled me off to technical support.
The guy brought up the REAL tower maps and told me that my old SIM card used a tower 'less than a mile' from my house. The new SIM card couldn't use that tower- now it tries to use one a few miles away.
"Well, can I switch back?"
"No...there is nothing we can do about it."
"So my service got a whole lot worse..."
"Yeah, it happens."
I wrote Cingular a few letters about it. No response at all.
To sum it up- Cingular sucks.
No reason to lie.
Verizon is a CDMA not a GSM network. You can unlock your phone but it's not much use except in the non-Verizon parts of the world that have CDMA (S Korea?). They have a international plan that can accomodate a GSM phone overseas but if youre going to be calling locally overseas it's just cheaper to buy a prepaid GSM phone from some random place in the destination country.
There are lots of hacks floating around for cracking OBEX. It seems to be faily trivial if you have the right cabling.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Frankly, Consumer Reports really doesn't know what they're talking about here. Since all national carriers require contracts, they have an aproximately equal lock-in on their subscribers. So, subscribers have an equal chance to leave any of the carriers. Who are they leaving? Well, they're leaving Cingular at 1.5% (post-pay) per month. They're leaving Sprint at 2.4% (post-pay) per month. They're leaving T-Mobile at 2.3% (post-pay) per month. And they're leaving Verizon at 0.95% (direct retail post-pay) per month. Verizon's numbers are better because they're not including indirect customers who tend to churn at a higher rate - but they're still somewhere between 1% and 1.24% (their total churn). Suffice it to say, it's easy to see who customers stay with. Is Consumer Reports talking out of their butt? Absolutely Yes! If you get results that are inconsistant with churn numbers, you either have to come up with an argument why churn isn't a good indicator of customer satisfaction or there's something wrong with your methodology. Frankly, the percentage of customers that leave each month is a really great way to see how many are dissatisfied.
Essentially, Consumer Reports methodology is inaccurate - almost to the point that random chance would have provided as good a result. For example, if I claim Cingular and Sprint are good and Verizon and T-Mobile are bad, I'm pretty much as accurate as their report saying that customers like Verizon and T-Mobile. Customers like Verizon, followed by Cingular, followed by T-Mobile, followed by Sprint. That's accurate and I have REAL data over a sample of MILLIONS to back that up.
Really? Or, do you mean that all phone sold by providers must be locked?
LegendMUD
Consumer Report's review (yes, I have a web subscription and read the entire thing) only covers the major contract-based cell phone providers. They don't discuss pre-pay or by-the-minute services of those providers, or discuss the pre-pay only providers at all.
I'm sure there are others here that prefer to remain disconnected from the world when not at my work desk, and only carry a cell phone for wife/family/emergency use. I just changed providers this week and have my own (very brief) review of the pre-pay providers.
I had been using Cingular's Pay-As-You-Go service, with by-the-minute pay rather than the monthly charge. (Actually, I had been using AT&T's pre-paid service until the merger.) I was on Cingular's CDMA network, which they are shutting down April 1. Cingular offered a choice of two new GSM phones for free for me to use to remain with them, but both phones were featureless and looked similar to the now-clunky Nokia phones of the early part of the decade. (That probably speaks more to Nokia's stagnant development, but Cingular still chose to buy and offer that product.)
I chose not to stay with Cingular in part because I was offended at the offer they made me, and in part because of my past service.
- While I have few to no problems with dropped calls, my wife says that she often has to dial 2-3 times before the call will go through. (The other times, it goes straight to voice mail without ringing.) This likely has to do in part with my phone (one of those ugly Nokia models) and part to do with the network (Cingular hasn't invested in their CDMA network in years, instead investing in GSM).
- I was more concerned with the expiration dates for their pre-paid minutes. AT&T offered 635 minutes with a year of expiration for $100, which is about 15 cents a minute. Cingular's $100 offer was 400 minutes, with only 180 day expiration. Given that I talk about 30 minutes a month, the loss of minutes was not so bad, but the expiration made the product useless. Instead I bought $25 for 100 minutes @ 90 day expiration, and had to buy another one each quarter. (They also shorted me a day every time I refreshed.) I think Cingular just changed the $100 card back to a year expiration, but it was too little too late.
Looking at other providers, I considered both major carriers that offer pre-paid plans, and the pre-paid only providers.
- Verizon's pre-paid plans cost, at minimum, $1 a day for service. The Verizon salesman at a Dallas Circuit City, to his credit, recommended that I not go with them as it would be too expensive for my needs.
- The Verizon rep instead pointed me to Amp'D mobile, which he said used the Verizon network. This would have allowed me to get a major-model phone (like a Motorola Razor). I didn't chose Amp'D because I don't want a phone with a camera (I attend 2-3 movie festivals each year, including one this past weekend, and I would have to surrender my phone if it had a camera), and I didn't really need a phone that still costs $200 or more for my pre-paid service. They also charge $0.25 cents a minute, and (from their brochures) would require quarterly fill-ups to avoid expiration.
- Cricket wireless has been advertising their pre-paid service in my area. They offer service here in Austin, but don't serve Dallas/Fort Worth where my family lives and my wife and I travel each holiday.
I chose Virgin Mobile, as they seemed like the best service for me:
- They offered nice-looking phones at reasonable prices. I got a Vox 8610, a nice flip phone without a camera, for about $25 from their website. The reviews I read about this phone before I ordered it were generally positive.
- They use Sprint's network. Despite the Consumer Reports publication, in 3-4 days of use I have yet to miss or drop a call. I am even able to receive calls and text messages while the phone's antenna is down, the phone is in my pocket, and I'm sitting down, which is an improvement. (Yes, the p
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I had AT&T because a) best coverage in my area if you had a GSM+analog phone b) best service plan for the money at my usage rate and c) inexpensive handsets. My coverage was excellent both in the city, country and along the interstates other than one particular area near my parents' house in a "shadow" of a ridge. I used that phone without fail across a big chunk of the eastern US with no troubles.
Then came cingular. My service became irregular as they decommissioned the analog towers before new GSM towers were up and running. They kept pressing me to "upgrade" my phone and used vaguely worded scare tactics that old phones were the devil (I loved my multiband Siemens S46). They "lost" the ability to unlock AT&T phones, something AT&T would do if you planned on traveling internationally. They discontinued my plan in favor of a "better" one that had more mintues but a later "unlimited" period. They refused to apply my company's employee discount unless I renewed my contract. The last straw came when they started mucking with the billing system and I got overage charges despite being well within my monthly limits.
I'd avoided Sprint b/c at the time I went with AT&T their phones were crap, IMO. The data service was new and the phones were high on glam features but with horrible battery life or form factors. This time I went with a Treo 650 with the unlimited data plan. Service is pretty good, though at times in the rural areas it doesn't match AT&T. Data speeds are surprisingly good, in the 128kbit range, which may be limited by the Treo's ability to process the data.
My boss got a Cingular Treo 650 at the same time. His was a nightmare. Data connection to the towers was great for software updates (I saw close to 220kbit when I downloaded service patches for him) so the Treo GPRS was pretty good but Cingular's internet connection was crap. It took upwards of 5 minutes for his Treo to synch email from our corporate mail server; mine would do it on Sprint in ~15 seconds. The Cingular add-on software kept trying to take over his phone functionality and if the unit reset or the battery went dead it would re-default to the Cingular-specific apps instead of the standard (and much superior) Palm programs.
Sprint CS is kinda spotty when it comes to the technical questions but nothing compared to Cingular, who were basically unable to comprehend that data != voice service and went to great pains to avoid transferring me to an engineer or data tech. When I did get to the Cingular engineering group for my boss it took several minutes to explain that "I can't get to a particular server using the domain name but I can using the IP" means their DNS is borked. Even then they never, ever, never called back when they said they would and "open" complaints would mysteriously becomes "closed" after 3 days.
Nope, I hate Cingular. Sprint is okay once you accept that most of the "free" phones are crap but that goes for Cingular too.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
It annoys me that Verizon cripples Bluetooth on almost all the phones within my price range. Add to that, refusing to include a USB cable and forcing me to pay $$$ to download pictures from my phone. bah.
Yes, I can order a USB cable (and did). Yes, I can find a tarball out there that will allow me to hack my phone to re-enable bluetooth. But in the end, I'm a consumer who just wants his damn phone to work without having to hack yet another item.
When my friend's Cingular Bluetooth phone immediately was able to mount on his Mac and drag & drop files to/from the phone, I looked at my Verizon phone and just wanted to throw it in the trash.
When my Verizon plan is up this spring, I plan on switching to Cingular.
Bonus that any upcoming Apple iPhone will likely be Cingular-friendly.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
It's obviously legal to sell (and purchase) an unlocked cell phone in the US. If you learned this in training, you were told incorrectly.
The absence of physical stores that carry unlocked phones means nothing with regard to the legality. It does, however, say volumes about low demand for unlocked phones. An average customer of yours would find little use for a cell phone without service, which is why you don't sell unlocked phones.
The legality of unlocking a phone you received from a specific carrier, however, *has* been called into question before. Here is an interesting article regarding locked phones and how it is now completely legal to unlock a phone you received from your carrier.
LegendMUD
As a former wireless sales representative, I can pretty much tell you this:
None of you really care all that much about the service. It's the phone you are interested in.
First of all, according to market research, nearly all of you are in complete and total denial. The internal company documents that I saw pointed to "Handset Dissatisfaction" as the number one reason for churn (the % of subscirbers lost in a given quarter). People care about the phone they get. They care about it as a fashion accessory and as a social interaction machine.
Here's my favorite part: no one ever admits it.
In fact, if this get enough mod points for people to read it, I can almost guarantee that there's going to be a slew of "Well, that's not why I bought the phone..." posts behind it. No one was honest about it. Being a fan of psychology, I'd often see how much I could make the customers squirm with this issue. I'd show them the phones, we had a bricky Nokia and a black Motorola clamshell (it's a clamshell phone, not a flip; it doesn't flip. it doesn't even half-flip, it opens... like a clam). I would tell the customer that the Nokia had better reception (it does, proven by internal company memos I saw), was more durable (it was, we rarely had any in the return bins, and I had a whole folders' worth of anecdotes about Nokias surviving), and was the phone I recommended to anyone who cared about features and substance over style (it was and still is).
Needless to say, everyone bought the Moto. It was notorious for breaking, had awful signal (a good 2-3 bars worse than the Nokia), a screen that cracked under the slightest pressure (it got SO bad and SO prevalent that the company actually had to begin covering cracked LCDs UNDER WARRANTY for this particular model, if that tells you anything). I couldn't give the Nokia away, and believe me, I WAS. Both phones were allowed to be sold for free (if it was required to close the deal, and it usually was), but I could poise the Nokia as a free phone, and the Moto as costing $50, because of the flip, and people would still pay for it. Even after I told them that I recommend the Nokia for reception and durability.
People gots ta have that flip shorty!
So my point is, while you try and tell us that what you want from your cellular service provider is good coverage, you don't. Not really. Bad wireless coverage is something we've all come to expect, we hardly even notice it anymore, or get bothered because it happens. What really drives customers into the store ISN'T the company, it ISN'T the service, and it damn sure isn't the cost. No, you, the customer, came to see me because I held the key to what you really wanted: a mobile phone that, like your Lexus, told everyone how big your penis really is.
You'll apologize for my overly cynical attitude, but quite frankly if you're a wireless customer that has gone into a retail store, I'm certain you're one of the people I learned to despise so easily while working there. Oh yeah, one more thing while I'm here, hey NUMBNUTS, the phone's not REALLY free! We subsidize the cost. We don't walk out back and pick one off the tree. They cost money. So when you destroy yours within 2 weeks of purchase, maybe the question you ought to ask isn't "Why did I get this for free two weeks ago and have to pay a hundred bucks now?" but rather "Why do I persist in owning things when it's clear that I'm not going to exercise any responsiblity during the course of my ownership?"
God I hate the wireless industry. Go ahead, feed the greed. Go get your RAZR or Chocolate or whatever schlock marketing scheme that you're busy NOT falling for. Trust me, the wireless companies have your number, and they are routinely screwing you in the ass and laughing about it, because you know what? You can't hear them. You're too busy talking on your Treo/RAZR/Chocolate/Blackberry/Sidekick/SLVR.
Whatever. There's not point to this post. There's no way to fix the system, and there's no way to get people to
Been with Verizon for over four years, and they have never, not once, resolved a problem without me having to complain to my state's Attorney General's Dept. of Consumer Affairs. The AG writes, and then, magically, somebody actually deals with the problem. The quickest I got anything resolved with them was six months, and multiple phone calls, letters, and harangues. The slowest was a year, with even more multiple calls, letters, yada, yada, yada. I've had three billing problems in four years, and the last time, when it took a year, they owed me $300. To say these bastards suck is being too kind. Obviously, once my indentured phonitude is up, that's the last they'll see of me. After that, it's voip all the way.
yup, I knew a girl, fresh out of college, who was planning a big party. She went to a local hi-fi store, "bought" a $2000 new stereo system, set it up for the party, and then returned it afterwards...
no moral compass...
I'm posting this anonymously as I worked for one of the companies in question here as a contractor. I was working on a GIS related application which plotted cellular towers, coverage, and store locations for usage by customer service representatives to aid customers in dropped calls etc. The coverage maps we utilized were processed data at three different dBm levels and were fairly blocky. Much of the coverage we utilized was "smoothed" to give a softer image to work with. The maps were much more simplified and "blobularized" (best word I can use to describe voroni polygons). These marketing maps indicate the boundary of the lowest signal you could possibly have and still have "coverage". Trust me when I say that these companys are out to **** YOU! They just want your rear end subscribed so they can charge the monthly fees. A landmark case in California (pardon the fact that I don't fully remember the specifics of the case) indicated that a user had coverage, required they use their cellular phone, which according to the coverage map indicated they had coverage, and were unable to make a call.
.02 yen on the subject.
The maps we as engineers had access to were much more accurate and would make a sales weasel cringe.
Just my