Best Coverage Among Wireless Carriers?

[WisCal]

What do customers—or in my case—soon to be ex-customer—really want?

I’ll tell you.  They want—and expect—service—Customer Service from companies with which they do business.  Let me give you just a few examples of AT&T’s “best-in-class” wireless experience.

I have over the past 2 years experienced more dropped calls from your service than I ever thought possible. I moved to Northern California in 2010--had purchased a new phone, and was added to a family plan there.  Almost from the moment I turned on the phone, I started to experience dropped calls, fuzzy calls, bad connections, missed text and voice messages—you name it.  At one point, I think I counted 50 dropped calls in a one-month period. I lived in the San Francisco area, where coverage should have been excellent. However, the coverage was so bad; I couldn’t even call from inside a house--or apartment—I was forced to walk outside to complete a call. I could stand next to a person with a Verizon phone…and guess who could send/receive a call…and who couldn’t? At one point, I was considering moving to a more remote part of California—and when I asked how the wireless coverage was there, I was told—Verizon is the only carrier that works here!  So much for your claim of 90% coverage in the US. We had a running joke with my family and friends…many who lived in Wisconsin—that if we only experienced three dropped calls per conversation…we were doing well!  How pathetic is that?  Such great service—for only $100.00 or more…per month!  I thought the choice of AT&T at the time was a good one--- AT&T is the biggest wireless carrier in the United States, as I’m sure you know, with 62 million subscribers… a 3G network…carrier for the iPhone… several plan options..GSM compatible phones for overseas calling…Great Marketing!!!  But boy was I in for a surprise. Since I was locked in for a 2-year contract, I figured I’d just have to grin and bear it. I even had to add a Vonage Mobile app to the phone to call internationally since your calling rates are simply outrageous.  It seemed pointless to complain to CS… it was always MY phone that was the source of the problem.  Or the towers…or…well, you get the idea.   Later on in 2011, I moved back to Madison, WI. I hoped the service would be better but in fact, it was not much better. In some areas, it was much worse. There are dead spots all over once you get out of a Metro area---Sauk City is prime example of a dead area for AT&T—but Verizon works there! Mr. Fine, overall I would have to say that AT&T’s wireless coverage is horrible. I’m guessing that your real problem is that your company is selling a product so fast that their supply lines can't keep up---and won’t admit that fact. Maybe AT&T should spend more time servicing their customers, rather than focusing on advertising for “raising the bar”.

[spd2demun ACE - Master]

Actually, Verizon is the largest Wireless carrier in the US.

And it's now Rethink Possible (instead of Raising the Bar).

You have to go with the carrier with the best service in your area.  I had the opposite experience with Verizon, so I switched to ATT.  And I'm in the 4th largest city in the US.

Try contacting Jam, one of the AT&T Community Managers for further assistance.

[JFizDaWiz]

Honestly 1 or 2 dropped calls a day isn't too bad (considering 50 in a month). There are many factors that would cause it.

[formercanuck]

I don't know... living in SoCal, if I was dropping 1 or 2 calls/ day, I'd be pretty ticked off, especially when my calls can last anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours.

Down here in SoCal, I haven't had any issues since ~2008, when AT&T added its 2nd channel onto 3G.  Before that, you could not even get through voicemail prompts before a call would drop on 3G.

[savethebologna]

Like any carrier, they have ups and downs. I loved AT&T when I was living about twenty minutes north of Scranton, PA. My sister got snappy, reliable 4G on her Desire and I never had an issue with my SGS Captivate. Then I moved down into the city. Scranton isn't huge, but service is a little spotty. What really gets me is the data, though. Every section of Scranton is slower than up in the mountains, where I used to live. But around my apartment in West Side and at the University of Scranton, data just slows to a crawl and yet the phone tells me: 3 bars of 3G. Apps time out and pages take up to half an hour to load, forget video or Google Music. It's unfortunate for the college kids, I included.

Verizon has LTE in the city, but in the areas around the city is AT&T's place to shine. I hope AT&T sees Scranton as a place worth doing business with.

[aristizzle]

I live in west texas (El Paso) and T-mobile is the most dominant carrier in my city, which is very hard for me to understand as their service is horrible here. My friend is on tmobile and he cannot use his 4g inside a building, and has numerous dropped calls a day. I think it's just the affordability that has Tmobile on the top here, but honestly the company has numerous outages and I would rather pay more to not have to deal with horrible service like that. 

Verizon is the second most dominant of the companies, I personally am a Verizon customer. Even being the top company in my city I still drop 1-2 calls a day. The 4g LTE service is very fast, but is still not available in all parts of the city yet, sometimes I do drop back to 3g. Have experienced 1 LTE outage since I purchased my phone back in November. 

AT&T would place 3rd.

Service is not that great here and another friend of mine does have fast 3g service on his 3gs, but does experience numerous dropped calls. He also has an issue with "fringe roaming" since we are so close to the mexican border.

Sprint would be 4th, and Sprint is just horrible. Their data speeds are extremely slow, and they have numerous outages, however they would have the least frequent drop call rate, usually around 1 a day for my friend who has the service.

What some people fail to understand is no wireless company has gotten to the point to be 100% perfect with no dropped calls at all. It's bound to happen, the technology is still growing and hasn't gotten to the point of perfection yet. If you are expecting a company to be 100% reliable like a wired company then your expectations are far beyond what technology can handle right now in the wireless industry. No carrier promises perfect service, if you read the customer agreements for all the wireless companies, they do advise that you will experience issues in buildings, with inclement weather, and will experience dropped calls.

[savethebologna]

Oh, and I don't think I've ever dropped a call.

A friend of mine complains once and a while about Verizon dropping a call.

And just about anyone who I know who has owned an iPhone has experienced more dropped calls on that than anyone else. My mother's iPhone 4 and my sister's former iPhone 3GS on AT&T and a friend's 4 on Verizon.