Monday, February 14, 2011

Why AT&T Is Making a Strong Case for a Verizon iPhone

I'll admit it, I'm lazy. That's pretty much why I'm with AT&T, despite never actually choosing AT&T. It was pretty simple: Years ago, for whatever reason, my parents signed up with CellularOne and came home with shiny clunky new cell phone for me, too. No complaints. I stuck with CellularOne who was then bought out by Cingular...which then turned into AT&T.

Over the years, everything has been a bit of a pain. The first problem occurred when making a phone call from my driveway (which was about half a mile from the store where I bought my phone) resulted in a roaming charge. That became less of an issue when companies stopped hitting you with roaming charges. After that, the issue became dropped calls. (Interestingly enough, the dropped calls didn't become a major problem until AFTER AT&T started advertising themselves at the network with the fewest dropped calls.) It was so bad people with whom I had frequent phone conversations were able to track where I was based on when calls would drop and I started warning people when the call was going to drop.

Lately, the issue has been 3G coverage. This didn't matter to me until a couple of years ago, when I finally decided to upgrade to a smartphone. I had originally decided on an iPhone, but decided against it when I realized that AT&T had no 3G coverage where my parents live (and where I spend a lot of time). Look at a map of AT&T's 3G coverage sometime...it's pretty limited. Did I say pretty? I mean extremely. And those ads that AT&T keeps running about how the iPhone users can talk and browse only on AT&T's network? That's AT&T's 3G network. If you're using Edge, talking and browsing isn't an option.

In the spirit of fairness, apparently AT&T's 3G is faster than Verizon's...where you can get it.

I finally chose a Blackberry Pearl which I then upgraded about a year later to a Blackberry Bold. I was able to get the Blackberry cheaper and decided that I refused to get an iPhone as long as it was exclusive to AT&T.

The other big argument for AT&T was their free mobile to mobile calling. Since the people I talked to the most on the phone also had AT&T, there was a very strong disincentive for switching carriers. If I switched carriers, phone calls to my friends would start eating up my minutes and their minutes....and probably wouldn't make me very popular. However, my phone habits have changed enough that this isn't the issue it was a year ago.

So, basically, I don't have a lot of incentive to stick it out with AT&T except for the early termination fee (I'm about four months into a two year contract on my phone). And since my bill is so high ($85 for one line, not including taxes), I'm willing to bet that my savings with another company would offset the ETF.

Fast forward to now and everyone is excited about the Verizon iPhone. My reaction? I can't decide whether to upgrade to an iPhone (I like the features) or get rid of a smartphone altogether. It's not quite as ridiculous as it sounds, since I have a 4G iPod Touch. (You know, the one Steve Jobs referred to as an "iPhone without a contract?") More and more places have free wifi now, so lately I've seriously considered switching to an iPod Touch and a regular phone. Another option my roommate and I have kicked around has been getting MiFi, especially since the iPad is now in the picture.

I've decided to wait it out until this summer, since there's a good chance that Apple will release a new model then. In the meantime, I'm getting more and more annoyed with AT&T's policy of rewarding only iPhone customer loyalty and ONLY iPhone customers. They seem to be confused about the fact that they're in danger of losing non-iPhone customers to Verizon.

For instance, when I checked Google Reader, I found this story about how AT&T is now offering iPhone customers 1000 free "loyalty" minutes. I don't need the minutes. I have 3199 as of last billing cycle and 308 minutes expired last month. The fact that AT&T has also started offering some iPhone users unlimited data plans again doesn't affect me either, since I never lost my unlimited plan. But the fact that AT&T is exclusively wooing iPhone users to keep them from switching, while ignoring other smartphone users who are paying just as much? I don't like it.

It's not enough to make me decide to leave AT&T right now, but it's definitely yet another little thing that's slowly tipping the scale towards....well, anyone but AT&T.