One third of iPhone hopefuls shun iPhone due to AT&T network
By Will Park on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 2:45 PM PST In AT&T, Apple, Hottest Hardware, Research, iPhone
AT&T (NYSE: T) really needs the iPhone, but the iPhone doesn’t need AT&T. That little fact alone is probably enough to give Apple (NSDQ: AAPL)’s Tim Cook reason to look for another iPhone carrier in the US. Add to that this recent survey from PriceGrabber.com and things are looking bad for AT&T. According to the poll, about 10% of respondents already owned an iPhone, which is great. But, a resounding 34% of respondents indicated that they will avoid buying an iPhone because it would require them to switch to AT&T.
PriceGrabber polled 2,411 respondents between June 12 and July 10. The poll asked why customers were waiting to buy an iPhone 3GS. Regardless of AT&T’s success with the iPhone, it’s sobering to see about a third of potential iPhone customers keeping their distance due to AT&T. It should be noted that the poll didn’t ask what about AT&T has kept iPhone hopefuls at arm’s length.
With the most recent kerfuffle over AT&T’s broken iPhone Visual Voicemail system, ongoing complaints of dropped calls and repeated service interruptions, it seems AT&T’s public image needs some work. Not to mention their actual network.
[Via: Gearlog]
That sure as hell is why I don’t have an iPhone.
iPhone on Verizon = instabuy
iPhone on AT&T = epic fail
Just switched to ATT from Verizon specifically to get the iphone. It boils down to this. Overall Verizon has better mass coverage than ATT. Although it is true that in some limited areas the data network can match and even surpass the speed of Verizon’s network, verizon has got more coverage in more places. That being said I recently returned from leaving my smaller home network where ATT is a competitive carrier to traveling through some very large markets and the difference is abysmal. San Francisco, for example had multiple dropped calls, during the same phone call. Much slower data speeds, and reduced quality. Overall the new data network is sexy…if you spend 90% of your time in excellent ATT data coverage. That being said, with Verizon and ATT both racing towards LTE 4G, and Apple shamelessly flirting with Verizon… I’ll probably be back to Verizon in a year.