Consumer Reports Finds AT&T as Worst Carrier

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iPhone customers are usually happy... unless they are on AT&T.

While AT&T may have the shiny status of being the sole provider of the iPhone (though some of that may be due to network technology standards), it seems that as a cellular carrier, it's dead last.

Over half of the respondents on AT&T had an iPhone, and they were much less satisfied with data service than their smartphone counterparts on other carriers that also consume similar sorts of data.

CDMA carriers Verizon and Sprint bested the GSM side at T-Mobile and AT&T. Surprisingly, U.S. Cellular, which doesn't the entire nation yet, ranked at the top with a score of 82 overall. Verizon and Sprint were neck and neck at 74 and 73 respectively, with T-Mobile at 69 and AT&T at 60.

AT&T issued the following response to Consumer Reports' findings:

We take this seriously and we continually look for new ways to improve the customer experience. The fact is wireless customers have choices and a record number of them chose AT&T in the third quarter, significantly more than our competitors. Hard data from independent drive tests confirms AT&T has the nation's fastest mobile broadband network with our nearest competitor 20 percent slower on average nationwide and our largest competitor 60 percent slower on average nationwide. And, our dropped call rate is within 1/10 of a percent—the equivalent of just one call in a thousand—of the industry leader.

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Marcus Yam

Marcus Yam is a technology evangelist for Intel Corporation, the latest in a long line of tech-focused roles spanning a more than 20-year career in the industry. As Executive Editor, News on Tom's Guide and Tom's Hardware, Marcus was responsible for shaping the sites' news output, and he also spent a period as Editor of Outdoors & Sports at Digital Trends.

50 Comments Comment from the forums
  • dogman_1234
    What, a monopoly is a bad provider? Shocking *sarcasm*
    Reply
  • UmeNNis
    Erm.... how is (what is now) AT&T a monopoly ...? Oh wait... it's not
    Reply
  • _Cubase_
    Is the pope Catholic?
    Reply
  • jacobdrj
    _cubase_Is the pope Catholic?Don't diss the Jewish Popes of yore...
    Reply
  • totheshed
    US Cellular ranked highest because it's inexpensive.
    Reply
  • takeapieandrun
    AT&T sucks. A lot of dropped calls, slow ass 3g, and data limits.
    Reply
  • IzzyCraft
    dogman_1234What, a monopoly is a bad provider? Shocking *sarcasm*Really wish people would understand that alot of that is the iphone itself, it's just a bad phone. Take a look at other smart phones from At&t you don't get nearly as many dropped connections and issues as you do with the iphone. There is also the thing of At&t would like to build more towers esp in urban area's but people don't want it built near them which begs the question to why are they complaining about shitty service.
    Reply
  • nebun
    ok let me tell you, 1 in a thousand dropped calls is a lot...let's say that AT&T has 10 million customers, that's 10 thousand customers which will have their calls dropped every minute...that's very bad
    Reply
  • no its 10 million customers who will have 1 in 1000 calls dropped...doesnt sound as bad that way does it?
    Reply
  • tigsounds
    We take this seriously and we continually look for new ways to improve the customer experience (payout).

    Data caps are based on a lie.
    Verizon turned on their so-called 4g this past week, AT&T soon. How nice to use your entire month's data allotment in less than 30 minutes. All these capped providers are drooling over the expected "overage" charges. Everybody should dump their data plans for at least one month and not re-connect until the caps come off.
    Reply