What is Digg?90 Comments
- jrapp, on 06/23/2008, -3/+45Sponsored by... Verizon??
http://i25.tinypic.com/33tjh4o.png - webkami, on 06/23/2008, -2/+36I can tell it is not Forbes.
1. Not a slide-show
2. One one page??? - baggachipz1, on 06/23/2008, -0/+20"With all the improvements of the past year, 2008 may finally be the year that wireless companies lose their terrible reputations."
Riiiiiight... THIS is the year! Finally! - mikephimikephi, on 06/23/2008, -1/+21Y'know what would make this so much easier to read...
an autoloading slide show!
/s - Azohko, on 06/23/2008, -0/+15I wonder what companies have the best customer satisfaction?
- robdiggity, on 06/23/2008, -2/+17Brothels.
- jman583, on 06/23/2008, -1/+15Brick makers
- waydee, on 06/23/2008, -1/+14Trust me that's not the problem, i've got the choice of about 5 different GSM providers here and they're all equally bad when it comes to customer service. It's just the nature of the industry, they have massive amounts of subscribers and have the advantage of most of them being locked into contracts - you can provide as crap a service as you want and know that the customers will continue to pay you for it. Regulatory authorities attempt to police them but know fine well that only a few complaints will ever end in a positive result for the customer, most of them put off by the lengthy procedures and burden of proof required. Some don't even realise there are regulators.
They operate as cheaply as they can, that means poorly staffed and badly paid customer service. You'll be lucky if you get through to someone in the same country as you, much less get a decent service from someone being paid minimum wage to pick up the phones. - azbmr, on 06/23/2008, -0/+13Want the worst service? One word: Comcast.
- JasonCox, on 06/23/2008, -2/+14I'm going to love my new iPhone 3G but I'm going to kick myself every day for getting stuck with AT-and-frakin-T.
~$75 bucks for 450 minutes and an Internet I cant even hook up to my laptop is just outrageous. - DephexTwin, on 06/23/2008, -0/+10Buried for using "2" instead of "to". We're not text messaging here, and I'm pretty sure you're not Prince.
- RedHerringHack, on 06/23/2008, -2/+11Verizon sucks for locking out GPS and Bluetooth on their phones, and then charging you for location services and tethering. Both of those services would add $25/month to the bill. Don't even begin to think you are getting all the features of the phone you paid for. Verizons network isn't THAT good. Personally, I have AT&T now, but was first with cellular one.
- optimus_maximus, on 06/23/2008, -1/+10The author is way out of date. Both Verizon and AT&T have unlimited plans. Verizon also has prorated termination rates and has for some time.
- Owned1Up, on 06/23/2008, -0/+9"Verizon, the leader of the group, scored 72, up one point from last year." hmmmm....
- rockefeller2, on 06/23/2008, -0/+7I went with prepaid 3 years ago and changed my cell phone usage behavior. I don't use a cell phone for general chatting, only important things. My cell phone is now my "emergency line" and I only use about $10 a month. Too many other less expensive means of communicating exist and I really hate the typical cell phone contract terms, 1 and 2 year obligations, cancellation fees, keeping track of minutes/schedules, etc , etc.
- d1a1s1, on 06/23/2008, -0/+5Buried cause I hate you
- yourmanstan, on 06/23/2008, -1/+61) that is oligopoly. 2) it is the 2 year contract. don't get one
- calinthematrix, on 06/23/2008, -0/+5/rant warning Hey Forbes, How about losing the damn "your opinion matters" survey popup that scrolls down the page and blocks your damn articles. I mean, I hate those effin things and if you really cared about your readers you wouldn't annoy them with popup ***** /end of rant
- Neddiw, on 06/23/2008, -0/+5DUGG for being "Sponsored by Verizon Wireless" on the article. Just Brilliant!
- Jonsey, on 06/23/2008, -0/+4"It's become such a pain to deal with cellphone service providers that one Verizon (nyse: VZ - news - people ) customer faked his own death last summer just to get out of his contract. "
Heh this sort of reminds me of a time when I worked for a wireless provider in Canada. I guess a customer got some sort of telemarketer call from us and their brother answered and told us that he was dead. So I get the call from the customer saying "Please don't cancel my phone! I'm not actually dead." - locojones, on 06/23/2008, -5/+9I don't know how this Ross School of Business calculates its statistics, but speaking from personal experience, there's no way in hell AT&T's *****-ass customer service, if you can even call it that, can hold a candle to T-Mobile, where calling a customer care representative is actually a pleasant experience. Equating the two is an outright travesty. On the one hand, we have T-Mobile, with excellent customer care reps and smoking deals on plans, and on the other we have the deathstar, who is complicit with the illegal surveillance and spying on American citizens and turning its back on its own customers. It will be a cold day in hell that AT&T sees one dime from me. *spits*
- akatherder, on 06/23/2008, -1/+5Maybe I'm lucky but I had some decent experience with Sprint. I got a cell phone plan for my wife. She kept using more minutes and suddenly her $40/month plan was costing over $100-$120. I called up Sprint and they upgraded the plan and applied the upgraded plan to a few previous months.
A few months later she went over her minutes and there was some issue with the text messaging. I told them to just cancel it and they offered free text messaging and added a few hundred minutes for $49.99. They accidentally dropped free sprint-to-sprint calling so that was another call the next month, but they re-added that and gave a credit for the previous month. - Shakermaker, on 06/23/2008, -0/+4I'm all geared up waiting for the iPhone to come out in Canada next month - but I'm hearing rumours that Rogers Telecom is going to make the phone plan so constrictive as to render it prohibitively expensive for anyone who doesn't make over $100,000 a year.
I hope I'm wrong, but I doubt it. - hasslinthehoff, on 06/23/2008, -0/+4With landlines, you had a choice of one crappy provider. With cell phones, you have the luxury of choosing from an array of crappy providers. Ah, progress!
- thegodfaza, on 06/23/2008, -0/+4About 15% of the page is the actual article. The rest is random flash junk.
- Icetype, on 06/23/2008, -0/+4OMG. How can you stand surfing without Adblock? That's horrific.
- antdude, on 06/23/2008, -0/+4And for Linux desktop. Uh huh.
- vr1000, on 06/23/2008, -1/+5Whomever designed this site should be kicked in the balls. It quite possibly is the worst site I have ever seen for a major American media outlet. The ads, the layout, the formatting... its like someone vomited on my screen.
- Azuroth, on 06/23/2008, -1/+4Did you, perhaps, fill out said popup survey to let them know it annoyed you?
- Mier, on 06/23/2008, -0/+3Absolutely. Verizon has a great network but their phones SUCK and well that's the part that's connected to the great network. So I'm going to get an iphone and hope that I get alittle lube when I sign with AT&T.
- thebigbradwolf, on 06/23/2008, -0/+3So, my grandfather died and when we were trying to settle his estate Sprint simply refused for 18 months to cancel the plan, insisting that after his death he renewed the plan for 2 years...and the "customer service techs" threatened frequently with lawsuits...Eventually we did end up winning. I'm pretty sure this is pretty much the regular kind of experience people have.
- uselessexpert, on 06/23/2008, -1/+4I have Adblock running on Firefox, so I would of never known.
Thanks for the pic. - uselessexpert, on 06/23/2008, -0/+3I can definitely agree with you on being lucky with Sprint too.
I just had a recent issue where I had changed to the Simply Everything plan for my Blackberry, and I was still being charged for nights and weekends.
I called, and within minutes someone (not in a call center out in the middle of nowhere with an indian accent) took care of the situation and retroactively reimburse me for each month I was charged.
And by the way, I rarely get any drop calls.
So kudos to Sprint for trying and improve their operations. - rkuchiki, on 06/24/2008, -0/+2It is kind of annoying seeing the same story get spun the wrong way a million times.
http://consumerist.com/consumer/exclusives/sprint- ...
I have no problem with Sprint. Verizon (non-wireless) on the other hand, their Level2 techs aren't even as competent as Sprint's level1. Still have unresolved issues at Verizon. - tendonut, on 06/23/2008, -0/+2After all the terrible things Cingular did to us over our 8-10 year range we had them (back when it was still Cellular One), Cingular dropped the ball when we bailed out of our contract to switch to Verizon by never charging us the termination fee for 2 of our 4 lines (family plan, 2 were already out of contract).
Ever since Cingular bought AT&T Wireless (the buyout before AT&T bought Cingular) our signal quality went from never dropping and alway having a full signal to total crap all the time. Then we had this billing glitch where a day was treated like a month and after 30 "months" of non-payment, we had the credit bureau after us for a $10,000 debt that never existed. Every 3 or so days we'd get another bill saying we missed ANOTHER months payment and that we were getting hit by a late fee and our bill was doubling. We were getting bills for July 2010 or so by the end of this fiasco. After about 9 days, we started getting bills that claimed my brother, who had a broken screen 6 months prior, used 1,200 text messages outgoing and 3,000 incoming. A few days later, the bill said I used 2,500 minutes that "month" which in reality was just a day, which is rather comical considering there is only 1440 minutes in a 24-hour period and I was hit up with massive overage. Obviously, customer service just told us to pay it and be done with it since there was nothing they could do, but we ended up getting lawyers involved and bailed on our contract. We still haven't been charged the early termination fee.... - BurnTees, on 06/23/2008, -0/+2i'll throw Verizon in with your AT&T when comparing to T-Mobile.
- bilbravo, on 06/23/2008, -0/+2My mom was on Cellular one with their prepaid phone and then AT&T took over. The AT&T prepaid phones don't work where she lives, even though AT&T canceled all of her remaining minutes before their actual expiration... awesome huh?
My verizon phone works wonderfully where she lives, but Verizon does not offer cell service to her zip code (i.e. one cannot sign a contract to use a Verizon phone there).
All wireless providers are evil. She uses Virgin Mobile now, which at least gives her relatively cheap minutes and no contract. - yourmanstan, on 06/23/2008, -1/+3how about when they ask you to sign up for a 2 year contract to tell them to kindly ***** OFF. they have no incentive to provide you with good service when you still have to pay them. month-to-month...they work harder to keep you happy.
oh, and STOP paying $20/mo for text messaging...it is 99% profit for them. - diulei, on 06/23/2008, -0/+2I've had Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile. T-Mobile customer service wins - hands down. Sprint's customer service (at the time) was nearly completely automated, and AT&T put me on hold for a minimum of 10 minutes each time. T-Mobile has a slower network, but their customer service is actually GOOD. I've never had to wait more than a few minutes, and the CSRs are always cheery and helpful.
- gglynn07, on 06/23/2008, -1/+3Why Cell Phone Companies Suck:
Nobody understands or can decifer/explain the product/service/technology that they are selling and the consumer is twice as dumb.
Everyone sells/buys services that are not the right fit and then complain about overage and coverage.
People think that a radio wave should be able to not only penetrate cement and steel parking garage 4 stories underneath the Earth but also out at their weekend getaway where the population = 3.
People buy phones based on style and not substance.
*sorry* many years in the cell phone industry. - xeomage, on 06/23/2008, -0/+2Not to shill, but U.S. Cellular just launched a new ad campaign called "Believe in Something Better". The company's focus is entirely on customer service. The only problem is they aren't nation-wide.
- iiifrank, on 06/23/2008, -2/+4Umm, then don't buy it?
What's the problem? - bilbravo, on 06/23/2008, -0/+2While it's great that you had good experience/luck getting your problems resolved and compensation for said problems, calling your experiences "decent" seems to be a stretch. :-)
- bpapa, on 06/23/2008, -1/+3Actually that's because you have no friends.
- beesaretasty, on 06/23/2008, -0/+2That's EXACTLY the problem with Sprint. If you don't call every month, you get screwed. They're generally willing to correct their mistakes, but I shouldn't have to call in every month to make sure they don't make it again. If they fix their billing departments obvious shortcomings, I'd be extremely happy with Sprint. I suspect they'd have a lot fewer customer service complaints as well...
- rickyg67, on 06/23/2008, -1/+3Yeah, for real. Its not AT&T that is not letting you hook up your phone to your laptop, it is the device. You can hook up any other device that AT&T sells to your laptop (some with better results) and get internet access. So, if you want to complain to someone, send Steve Jobs a letter.
- Joe11Blue, on 06/23/2008, -0/+2TXTing is dumb. Just call the person it's cheaper.
- Joe11Blue, on 06/23/2008, -1/+3Yes, because he doesn't want to waste time and money on something that people lived without not even 12 year's ago perfectly fine. That's why he has no friend's. You wish you had friend's that gave a damn about you without a cellphone, cause you know they would never even bother talking to you if they actually had to come find you ;)
I hate that I'm cooler than you BS. - prleet, on 06/23/2008, -0/+2I am ashamed to say I still hold on to a cell. I am trying to reinvent rotary phones, pocket size in fact.
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