| reply to rec9140
Re: MVNOs said by rec9140: quote:
said by rf_engineer:
I don't look at bars, I look at customer churn. Sprint has consistently had higher churn than AT&T/Cingular and Verizon. In Q1 2007 they had the highest of the big four.
As always your mileage may vary, but churn is a pretty good overall barometer.
Of course, I'm old school (I used to work in cellular) and I've found the trend of all of wireless over the past seven or eight years troubling and annoying.
From an RF person this is absurd, coverage and network are all that matters. If I can't make a call when I need to then the provider is useless. Sprint is a joke of a carrier their native coverage looks like a roadmap for interstate highways. Their poor coverage is what leads to churn. Your last point though I will agree with, cellular has went down hill since the StarTAC and the whole stupid flip and thin craze. Along with the feature creep..... Its a phone people, its to make calls! You're misinterpreting my "bars" comment. Bars are what people read on phones and talk about X carrier being better than Y. We'd often joke in cellular when a customer called about how many bars they were getting that we would drive out to the cell site and turn it up a bar or two 
Coverage is important. But one person saying X carrier is great because they get six bars in Hometown, Nebraska isn't indicative of great coverage. As you mention, maps are what you need to look at. You use test vans equipped with real gear to measure that, not a $50 shiny phone that takes pictures and has a signal meter that varies 15 dB.
For overall health, though, I'm not going to look at just coverage, I'm going to look at churn. If overall coverage is poor, it's probably going to be reflected in churn.
I'm with you on things going downhill. I just want a phone that I can make calls with and send some emails. I don't need music, video, pr0n, IM, and sport scores. Unfortunately subscriber growth is flat as they've gotten every customer they can get. Now it's a battle to entice customers over from other carriers with stupid features. |
