“That’s the key finding in a survey released this week by Yankee Group, which reports that 73% of iPhone users are very satisfied with AT&T’s service,” Goldman reports. “That rating compares favorably to how non-iPhone smartphone users feel about AT&T, and even to how non-iPhone users feel about other wireless providers.”
Goldman reports, “The satisfaction rate of AT&T subscribers as a whole is 68%, and only 69% of smartphone users say they are satisfied with their mobile provider, Yankee Group found.”
“The results are surprising, given the pounding AT&T has taken in the media and on the blogosphere about its service-related issues with the iPhone,” Goldman reports. “So what explains Yankee Group’s conclusion that iPhone users’ love AT&T? ‘Consumers transfer the high gloss of their Apple iPhone experience to AT&T,’ says Carl Howe, Yankee Group analyst and author of the study. ‘The iPhone creates a halo effect that rubs off.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Steve Jobs likes to call the iPad “magical,” but he might have an even greater magician on his hands; anything that can make AT&T seem “very satisfactory” to so many users is downright supernatural.
I have dealt with all the major cell phone carriers. In each case, except AT&T, I have been whipped into a near homicidal rage by their policies and “customer service.” AT&T irritates me on occasion, but nowhere near to the same degree. By comparison to what else is available, I too am very satisfied with AT&T.
The MDN Take is right on.
The true test of iPhone user happiness will be when that exclusivity agreement expires.
Never trust a Yankee
Well lets face it, the other guys don’t set the bar to high.
Verizon has more coverage its true but if your in the 80% of their coverage area covered by AT&T it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Verizon is number one and they act like it. That is to say obnoxious.
And Sprint…ehh…well….How the hell are they still in business!!! I guess it takes a while to fuck up the account of every single user.
@R2
you’re right.
When the exclusivity is gone, I’ll be right where I am now. With AT&T.
Outside the city limits, verizon has zero towers… I spend my weekends out of the city.
Try calling 911 with no service message on your verizon phone.
When I was riding in the mountains 2 years ago with our group, the guy we came across who broke his arm 10 minutes earlier on the trail… Couldn’t call 911. We could. Oh yeah, 15 miles from the city.
Now that’s what I call a “silent majority”!
It comes down to geography and signal strength. The satisfied AT&T customers are in good signal areas. The dissatisfied ones get a different carrier.
Plot a map of the satisfied vs. dissatisfied customers. The satisfied customers will be tightly clustered in urban areas. It will look a lot like AT&T’s 3G coverage map – with vast areas of dissatisfaction across the rest of country. Apple is missing out on billions of dollars in revenue from the AT&T’s unsatisfactory service areas.
ATT is awesome, has been way better than Verizon for me, and I’m sick of the ATT bashing
ATT had the guts to take on the iPhone originally which was a HUGE risk
give them some credit and their customer support has been great for me whenever I’ve needed it
poopy to the naysayers
A challenge to mdn. I will meet you in 10 places in NYC. I will have with me an iPhone4 and a 3 gs. Bring an iPhone plus any other smartphone on any other network (make it VZ).
How about these places:
Corner of WS and Broad.
Water street and wall street.
42nd and lexiington.
Fifth and 59th.
Times square.
Union square.
You pick the rest.
miami here, no complaints at all, iphone 2g, 3g and now 4. traveled and used it in all the trouble spots including SFO and NYC without issue, and so over antennae-gate.
There seems to be a double standard afoot:
When a minority of iPhone 4 users complain of an antenna issue, MDN (rightly) pounds home that they are indeed a minority, and that a majority of iPhone 4 users are very satisfied with their iPhones.
But when it’s revealed that a majority of ATT users are very satisfied with their network service (implying that it is a minority of users who are having issues), MDN dismisses this as “supernatural”.
MDN’s editor(s) are part of the minority of users who routinely have issues with ATT’s service, and they are (justifiably) using their own platform to amplify their concerns. Nothing wrong with that, but let’s recognize it for what it is – a bias that we must take into account when we read MDN posts concerning ATT.
Kudos to MDN for publishing this story (We ALL know MDN feels about ATT.)
Like others ATT has been a good service for us since we signed up with Cingular. No major problems. Cusfomer service was always helpful – more so than Verizon. (I am a big fan of Verizon’s FIOS service. Have no plans to switch to Verizon if/when the iPhone comes to their network.
Sent from my iPhone.
There’s a HUGE flaw with the survey.
Let me ask…how many of you like reading MacDailyNews?
If we had a response of 73%, would that seem high or low? To me, that would seem unbelievably low. What are the other 27% of you doing here right now?
How about asking the millions of former AT&T subscribers how satisfied they were with AT&T before they left?
That being said, count me as someone who’s used Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile and actually do prefer AT&T. If the iPhone were available on any carrier, I would still chose AT&T. But that’s not what the survey was asking, nor am I necessarily the type of person who was asked.
All I can say is that some people are evidently very easy to please! AT&T totally sucks, and not only because their crappy network drops at least 50% of my calls at some point during the conversation. They dragged their feet for years before letting people tether their iPhones; and even when they finally allowed it, they tacked on a totally gratuitous monthly charge that is nothing short of highway robbery.
If this poll is accurate, it just proves that most people don’t know good from bad. Given the state of the world, big surprise!
Whining, babylike and immature Americans cant handle it. ATT slaps you loser cry babies who complain about the company like a errant little fsck.
@deus ex
100% agree.
Granted I have never been to, nor desire to go to, NYC. Or anywhere AT&T is “bad”.
From *my* experience I prefer AT&T anyday.
@Tim Rosencrans
I though you and Guildenstern were… uh… nevermind. Good to see you posting…
I got your whining swinging X, where ever your from go back troll.
I’m not fond of AT&T reception here in Los Angeles spotty at best. Also AT&T and how they are changing pricing and treating friends with ending contracts is making me look at other phones when my contract is up the end of the year. I for one looking forward to iPhone opening up to other service providers.
All I can say is that I used Verizon for almost 20 years… last 5 or so with Treo.
ATT is definitely superior… and my fear that it sucked was the main reason it took me 6 months to buy an iphone 1…
I lose many fewer calls with ATT than I did with Verizon… maybe Verizon has improved in the 3 years I’ve been using ATT but at the time I switched with iPhone 1, ATT was better… and is better today with iPh4 — death grip and all — than anything I’ve used.
That said… show me Verizon is better with a few million iphones stressing their system and I’ll consider it…
Did ATT pay for the research?
I don’t even get ATT reception in my house, which is in the bay area peninsula. They r that bad.
@Jambo
I get great reception and I am in the bay area peninsula as well. My son, daughters and grandkids also live in the bay area and all get good reception. I live at 800 feet up the hills so maybe that is why I get 5 bars almost all the time. Well only 4 bars sometimes now they have updated. But no dropped calls. You should either go with Verizon or move. Or get one of those wifi cell things.
I wouldn’t call 73% a “vast majority.”
But this is another case of the minority making so much “noise” that it seems like “everyone” is have problems. The people who are having no problems are mostly “silently happy,” so you never hear anything from them.
AT&T’s customer service reps are actually knowledgeable. Unlike Sprint.
Did noone here notice that the survey reports that the satisfaction rate of non-iPhone AT&T users (69%) is actually slightly ahead of OTHER carriers???
“That rating compares favorably to how non-iPhone smartphone users feel about AT&T, and even to how non-iPhone users feel about other wireless providers.”
In other words, even though the 69% number is just a comfortable majority (and not an overwhelming one), it is STILL better than OTHER carriers (and this includes Verizon).
The basic point is, ALL US wireless carriers suck, but it seems that they all suck even harder than AT&T.
What do you have to say about that (and saying “bull$h!t” isn’t allowed, since this isn’t opinion but a properly executed survey)?