26% of AT&T iPhone Owners Going to Verizon | Hacker News Reader

26% of AT&T iPhone Owners Going to Verizon

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41 pointsgatsby30 comments

I'll believe it when I see it. It's one thing to check a box on a survey, but the outcome will be contingent upon a lot of factors, not the least of which is the contractual situation that each of these customers finds themselves in. Wireless carriers love contracts. More specifically, they love to keep customers under contract.

Of the 26% that said they would switch, how many would do so if it cost them an additional $100 in early termination fees? How about $200? Add in a $199 iPhone, plus activation, and you're looking at over $400 in some cases.

I don't think anyone believes that 26% will actually switch. Surely the actual conversion will be lower - but that's not the point.

The point is that 26% of AT&T's iPhone customers are so displeased that they are itching to leave, and as you mentioned astutely, if they stay it's only because they've been effectively chained down by a contract.

A business where a large portion of its customer base are involuntarily there is a severely sick one, and will either fail out of its own accord, or continue to hold back in the industry by propping itself up with monopolistic behavior and paid-for regulations.

I don't necessarily disagree that ATT customers are grossly dissatisfied, but I don't think they're alone. Sadly, I don't have any more recent numbers, but the study linked below shows that 47% of all cell phone users would switch to a competing provider to get a lower price if they didn't have to pay ETF fees. At best, cell phone users feel no loyalty for their carrier. At worst, the hate them almost universally.

http://www.uspirg.org/newsroom/financial/financial-privacy--...

Dear AT&T customers, All the great things you hear about Verizon are lies. Please, don't come over to this network - it's really horrible, I swear! That's why I'm a lifetime Verizon customer. I mean, er...

Signed, A VZW Subscriber Panicked about AT&T Refugees

Exactly, I want to see what the AT&T network looks like the most heavy iPhone users move on. For several years Verizon network had minimal smart phone users, but after Android and iPhone usage ramps up they could have the same sorts of issues.

PS: I want to stick with AT&T because Verizon has shitty reception around around my parents house. But, where I live and work the AT&T data network is heavy oversubscribed.

Well, the early release works to an advantage: the power users will be there from February to June (when the iPhone 5 is released.) Meaning that anyone willing to wait for the new one will get to pick a carrier in real-world conditions.

Hehe. We broke down and bought a Verizon Femtocell, so we will get all of the wonderful "IN" network effect of people switching back to Verizon, but will always have our own bandwidth to call from.

Dear AT&T customers, All the great things you hear about Verizon are completely true. Please, move over to their network - it's really amazing, I swear! That's why I'm still an ATT customer. I mean, er...

Signed, An ATT Subscriber excited about AT&T refugees freeing up some bandwidth.

Yeah, I'm really hating the Verizon iPhone. Verizon's network is great with Android right now - fast and reliable no matter where you are. I hope all the iPhone users don't spoil that.

AT&T is just horrible. I am in Bangladesh right now and I jailbreaked my iphone and I am using GSM from a local provider called "GrameenPhone"; I have better network and internet speed here than I had in NY with AT&T.

Pathetic.

The same thing happened to me in Egypt and Jordan.

FWIW, if you had a CDMA phone you couldn't have done that

(not an argument for AT&T, but for GSM)

I would never get a CDMA phone. iphone or not, AT&T sucks.

Clearly someone is getting their alphabet soup backwards...

That's not an argument for GSM, it's an argument for SIM cards. The increased station density requirement for UMTS makes me hate it with a passion. Low freq transmission is finally fixing that problem but it's too little too late. Everyone should have just thrown their weight behind CHDMA2000 1x -> LTE.

(In case you can't tell, I'm annoyed that the majority of the world chose the technically shitty TDMA/GSM -> GPRS -> W-CDMA rather than the 2G CDMA -> CDMA2000 1X. The worst part is people saying that CDMA2000 1X was backwards because the rest of the world chose W-CDMA.)

not to disagree with your point, but it's a supply/demand issue. In Bangladesh, I'm sure the pipes they don't have enough of (though times are changing) deliver water. In the US, the pipes we have issue with are the ones that deliver data.

Market's will eventually resolve the supply/demand imbalance but things take time to build. The expectation for things to happen instantly is partially a product of the instant-information age we've been living in for the last 10-12 years. These days so much of the demand side is expected to be instant that we forget the production side isn't.

I'd also be curious to see bandwidth production/consumption data broken down by country.

Better headline: AT&T Network to Become 26% More Reliable. :)

Well, more specifically 26% of survey respondents said that. I think the original article is actually a better read:

http://www.investorplace.com/28029/impact-verizon-apple-ipho...

AT&T has repeatedly ignored the desires of it's customers. For proof of this I'd cite the MMS debacle. The iPhone lauched in 2007 and iPhone customers couldn't send MMS messages for more than 2 years after. As if people somehow sending pictures of their cat to one another would cause the entire network to melt. Another example of this is tethering. Tethering, like MMS was promised for OS 3 but wasn't available for over a year in the USA because AT&T didn't want it's customers to use it. And when they finally did, the cost was a high one. They did away with the unlimited data plan, and restructured to a tiered plan with an anorexic allotment of 2GB per month. If you still had your unlimited plan, and wanted to use your phone to tether, you'd have to permanently forfeit that plan in favor of the tiered one. And you also have to pay a surcharge for the privilege. And the data you use while on tethering would count against your normal allotment. Almost like AT&T engineered a plan specifically designed to discourage users against using it.

Mabey AT&T is having financial difficulty and can't invest into the network as a result? But according to http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2010/snaps... they're not hurting for money. So despite making more than $10Billion in profit, they simply can't let iPhone users use their phones the way they were designed to be used.

Secondly, AT&T realizes the network sucks, they just don't care. Case in point the AT&T microcell from Cisco. (See http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/24/att-3g-microcell/ ) It's a wonderful little device that plugs in to your Ethernet to provide you a perfect reception in your house. People in citys that have bad service, namely San Francisco, and New York would really benifit from this but AT&T in their infinite wisdom has decided that this magical technology must come at a price. And the cost of a cell phone that actually works? About $150. Take a moment and reflect on that. AT&T knows your service sucks, but unless you pay them, you're out of luck. That's not telecommunication, that's extortion.

AT&T has long been able to abuse it's iPhone customers simply because they had a monopoly on the iPhone. That ends next month. So I will be among the first to switch and frankly I think the fact there will be more than one carrier will benefit both. Verizon will be getting a massive amount of new customers, and AT&T will have the bandwidth those customers would use freed up.

I was hesitant to switch to AT&T when I bought an iPhone 4, but I have to say I haven't had any problems with them. In Chicago I have had more problems with Comcast than I've had with AT&T. I'll be sticking around.

A lot of people don't know this: on Verizon, apps can't connect to internet while on a phone call. I'll wait...

They wish. And by they, I mean AT&T and Verizon. AT&T needs users to switch to Verizon so the network can finally get some relief, and for the PR outbreak that will happen when Verizon users finally realize the limitations of CDMA. Verizon needs this to secure the revenue from iPhone users, as well as to prove the resiliency of their network. Consumers are going to win this battle. The carriers will lose.

There is no way that AT&T is wishing to lose customers. Some of the AT&T users may wish that others would switch. But AT&T will do anything it can to keep the customers.

Unless they're the most difficult, ToS breaking, bandwidth sucking users on the network. I think it was AT&T that showed us the stats on mobile data usage. They stated that only 2% of mobile data users were consuming over 2gb a month. They could make a lot more money for the same bandwidth by losing these customers (and gaining different ones). Just playing devil's advocate here.

"AT&T needs users to switch to Verizon"? You raise your prices to deal with the demand for your services. You don't secretly wish your competitor snatches them away.

Actually, that's what they did. See above for the vitriolic reaction.

I'm surprised people keep taking these Change Wave surveys at face value.

They don't even do random phone interviews but use a self-selected sample of about 15,000 folks who signed up to take their surveys. And they brag that those are early adopters and "professionals" - so not exactly a representative group.

Also, just by default, I never trust a survey about consumers' opinions about future purchase decisions. It's too easy to say you are going to buy something in a survey and then never do it. Given that and the early termination fees and the pure hassle of switching providers, these numbers just seem awfully high.

Hopefully that comes to fruition, I may get good service with less congestion. I would consider the move if it didnt mean switching to CDMA. I use data + voice often enough that this is a deal breaker.

Well AT&T certainly got off easy... I expected something closer to 60 or 70%

.. wait until at&t iphone users see verizon iphones perform next to them. I can see a lot of vzw users telling their at&t friends to switch, so that they can, you know, talk.

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