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.
Consumer Reports conducted a survey from 58,000 of its readers and found that AT&T was the only carrier to have a drop in its ratings in overall satisfaction.
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.
