Sunday, June 21, 2009

Choosing The Right Cellular Phone Carrier

By Cathy L. Kimble

Cellular phones rely on the carriers strength. The signal makes the phone. This can mean the difference to a phone being a good phone or a great phone. You can easily take as much time to find the best calling plans and area reception as you would to finding the best cellular telephone. The problem is, locating information about calling plans is tough because this involves comparing oh so many variables. That is why a lot of online review sites avoid this subject.

As said by J.D. Power and Associates, wireless service has reached such high quality that cell phone users no longer find it a requirement to maintain a land line as well as a cell phone. It appears cell phones are enough. But as with most statistics there are combating results. According to comScore Networks, an amazing 1 out of 4 cellular customers are not satisfied. These combating statistics show how cellular technology is still in its growing stages. Even ask someone about their service, you will always get miced results, those that love and those that hate their carrier, with plenty of stories to boot. J.D. Power and Associates also finds that people who had an unresolved problem with their carrier, after trying customer service, were six times more likely to switch provider. That is were cancellation fees come into play. You see cell phone companies want to maintain their customer for good or for worse and have implemented cancellation fees to increase customer retention. Even the intro of 3G Networks, which started off with great expectation has received its share of complaints. So how do you decide on the best carrier? Well here is a rundown of which carriers rank best.

According to comScore, Verizon Wireless has consistently been rated the best carrier in terms of coverage and service. Overall, only six percent of customers break their service contract.

AT&T/Cingular come in second, just behind Verizon. Alltels customer service contract breakers are more numerous, coming in at 9 percent, while Sprint/Nextel have an even higher dissatisfaction rating at 11 percent. At the bottom of the heap is T-Mobile, with 15% of customers wanting to break out of contract obligations.

Keep in mind that the above comScore survey is not location specific and it also uses the ration of contracts being broken as the main deciding factor for popularity. J.D. Power and Associates confirms that Verizon is the leader, but also mentions that this leadership is more specific to the Northeast (Verizon has the strongest coverage in the Northeast). And T-Mobile that had the lowest rating with comScore, ranked first for the Southwest, according to JD Power and Associates. Moreover, Verizon ranks lower when speaking in terms of the CDMA mobile telephones that run it. These CDMA rather than GSM phones tend not to accept Subscriber Identity Modules (SIM Cards) which prevents their use when travelling overseas. Another downer is that Verizons rates are considerably higher that the competition and their billed appear to be complicated to read.

Sprint is also very popular in the Southwest, according to J.D. Powers and Associates. But J.D. Powers and Associates also concedes that Sprint ranks lowest in call quality. The PcMagazime survey also confirms that Sprint ranks lowest in call quality. The PCMagazine survey also gave T-Mobile a rank as the best carrier in terms of pricing. This is second to Alltel when it comes to service plan options. GSM cell phones, and a wide variety of them can be used on the T-Mobile network these GSM/SIM card compatible phones also enabe you to use the one overseas.

Prepaid cell phones deserve their own category all together. Virgin Mobile won the highest marks, just ahead of TracFone and T-Mobile respectively. Verizon, AT&T , follow in order of decreasing popularity, with poor Sprint/ Nextel once again at the bottom of the heap.

The call carrier landscape is a complicated one. Which carrier you choose may depend not only on how many phone calls one makes, but what part of the county youre in, whether or not you travel internationally, and even what type of phone hardware best suits your purposes. It pays to research this so you can avoid being trapped in a contract you want to break out of.

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