For some time lately, I've been seeing Cingular's billboards claiming "the leading independent research company has concluded that Cingular has the fewest dropped calls of any wireless carrier." I've suspected that ad to be a load of cow manure since I first saw it: my personal phone carrier is Cingular, and I get dropped (or 'failed' calls, which is another issue) quite a bit. Since I rarely use my work phone (Verizon), I didn't have anything to really compare my Cingular experience with, but something told me that ad had to be wrong (not to mention that, every time a call is dropped, the ad comes to mind as salt in the wound).
Today, I feel vindicated. I came across
this post at Mouse Print.org detailing some investigation into Cingular's claims. To summarize:
- the unnamed "leading independent research company" is a company called Telephia (which I've never heard of, but I've not heard of many research companies, anyway...)
- Telephia isn't exactly supporting Cingular's claim
- the claim apparently contradicts reports from two better-known companies: JD Power and Consumer Reports
If nothing else, I know that I'm not the only one who finds Cingular's claim disingenuous. Cingular also has had other issues (including a class action suit filed by former AT&T Wireless customers who felt that Cingular "deceived [them] into paying extra fees and degraded their service" after Cingular acquired that service [
ZDNet]), but, then again, other wireless carriers have had problems as well (like Verizon crippling advertised features in certain phones [
Wired Blogs]).
I guess we simply must choose the lesser of two weevils...
