AT&T versus Verizon, part one

I’ve been a cus­tomer of AT&T’s for over sev­en years. For the most part it was six good years and one real­ly bad year. When I first switched over to AT&T Wire­less their GSM cov­er­age was spot­ty, but the dead zones were con­sis­tent and I when I was­n’t in one the recep­tion was clear and strong. In 2005 when Cin­gu­lar bought AT&T the dead zones dis­ap­peared and I’ve had clear recep­tion any­where in the City limits.

So when Apple cut their exclu­sive deal with AT&T for the iPhone I defend­ed AT&T from crit­ics who claimed Apple had tied the iPhone to the «worst» cel­lu­lar provider. I applaud­ed Apple for mak­ing a phone run on GSM instead of CDMA net­works, and in the US, the GSM play­ers are AT&T and T‑Mobile. Of the two, AT&T was the most like­ly to pro­vide the infra­struc­ture that a pop­u­lar, data-hun­gry Inter­net device requires. Even a year after the iPhone was released, when the iPhone 3G came out, T‑Mobile did­n’t offer 3G net­work speeds.

GSM vs CDMA

There are two cel­lu­lar phone tech­nolo­gies in Amer­i­ca. GSM and CDMA. The CDMA net­work is almost exclu­sive­ly Amer­i­can. Cana­da, Mex­i­co, and a few oth­er coun­tries run CDMA net­works, but most of the world has only GSM cell net­works. When I first switched to AT&T it was in part because AT&T was switch­ing over to GSM. I thought I might trav­el abroad and want­ed a phone that could oper­ate on the fre­quen­cies and pro­to­cols offered in Europe and Asia.

It seems a bit sil­ly that the USA has its own cel­lu­lar pro­to­col and I’ve been glad to vote with my dol­lars to adopt GSM in favor of CDMA. I don’t see any rea­son for a balka­nized field of cel­lu­lar tech­nolo­gies, espe­cial­ly in the absence of any tech­ni­cal advan­tages of CDMA. If CDMA were in some way supe­ri­or to GSM, I’d want the rest of the world to catch up with the US, but as it stands it seems as though the US has their own cel­lu­lar tech­nolo­gies for no rea­son oth­er than to avoid fol­low­ing the rest of the world.

Enter the iPhone

I bought the iPhone 3G in August of 2008, replac­ing my Palm Treo 680. It took a while before the iPhone reached the lev­el of capa­bil­i­ty I’d come to expect from the Treo — the fin­ger­tip inter­face still isn’t as reli­able or accu­rate as the sty­lus­es that Steve Jobs won’t allow near his devices. But the soft­ware keeps pro­gress­ing and mak­ing the iPhone a more and more pow­er­ful platform.

Then a lit­tle more than a year ago the iPhone 3GS came out, and on that day every­thing changed. Overnight my phone ser­vice went from reli­able to near­ly nonex­is­tent. I received voice­mail alerts for calls that nei­ther rang nor appeared in my call logs. Phone calls failed more often than they didn’t.

The one thing I did which alle­vi­at­ed the prob­lems was dis­able 3G net­work­ing. With 3G net­work­ing turned off, the sit­u­a­tion went most­ly back to its old reli­a­bil­i­ty. Of course, that rais­es the ques­tion: what’s the point of pay­ing for a 3G phone as well as extra mon­ey every month for 3G ser­vice which can’t be used?

My solu­tion (if you want to call it that) was to sell the iPhone 3G and get an orig­i­nal iPhone. That reduced my month­ly fee by a lit­tle but I was still stuck with a device that want­ed data faster than it could feed itself, and a device that is not capa­ble of run­ning iOS4 and the newest ver­sions of many improved apps. I had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to pick up a used 3GS at a very rea­son­able price after the iPhone4 came out and I took it.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, noth­ing has changed, net­work-wise. I’ve spo­ken to more AT&T rep­re­sen­ta­tives than I can recall and got­ten nowhere. Noth­ing has improved. In order to own this phone I have to pay for 3G access but in order to talk on the phone I have to turn 3G access off. For all their talk, AT&T refus­es to address their prob­lems, which affects near­ly every­one else I know with AT&T and a 3G device.

My con­tract with AT&T ends in less than two weeks, so I have an oppor­tu­ni­ty here to try out anoth­er cel­lu­lar provider. On Fri­day I signed a con­tract with Ver­i­zon Wire­less and walked out with a Palm Prē. There is a 30 day win­dow where I can can­cel, return the phone, and void the con­tract if the ser­vice isn’t any bet­ter than what I’ve been get­ting with AT&T or if the Palm Prē does­n’t meet my needs.

Many options

When choos­ing my ser­vice plan with Ver­i­zon I looked at my past usage with my AT&T iPhone. Per­haps because I have learned not to rely on my phone for talk­ing, I have used a total of eighty min­utes of talk­time in the last month, includ­ing mobile-to-mobile and weekend/night min­utes. That means that (not includ­ing the data plan in fig­ur­ing the price) that even at the low­est-usage plans for both AT&T and Ver­i­zon that I’m pay­ing more than a dol­lar for each minute of talk­ing. This rais­es the ques­tion of whether I real­ly need a cel­lu­lar phone at all.

Any change requires giv­ing up some capa­bil­i­ty. I’ve con­sid­ered switch­ing to Skype with­out any voice plan. That would lim­it me to using the phone only in range of a WiFi net­work. That seems like it would make me less access­able but in fact most of the time when I don’t have access to WiFi I’m going from place to place, and I don’t use a phone at all when I’m on the motor­cy­cle for rea­sons that should be obvi­ous. So actu­al­ly, a cheap pre­paid phone would prob­a­bly suf­fice for all my voice needs— — I can’t ignore the need to have a real cell phone when I’m out of town on the motor­cy­cle. Emer­gen­cies of all sorts do hap­pen and help should always be just a phone call away.

While I don’t use much in the way of voice min­utes, I do use text mes­sag­ing com­par­a­tive­ly heav­i­ly. AT&T’s data net­work has recent­ly been so clogged that sim­ple text mes­sages have failed to go through or have tak­en min­utes to arrive, even when my phone shows a clear sig­nal. That’s all the more rea­son to leave AT&T, but leav­ing AT&T means aban­don­ing the iPhone, and I’d either need a device that can be typed on eas­i­ly and quick­ly, or I’ll have to change my text mes­sag­ing habits.

All this is to say that over the next cou­ple weeks I will be pay­ing very close atten­tion to both the qual­i­ty of ser­vice I receive with Ver­i­zon and the qual­i­ty of the expe­ri­ence I have with the Palm Prē. I’m not con­vinced that Ver­i­zon or the Palm Prē are my best options but I am look­ing for­ward to learn­ing what I can about them and any oth­er options I have.