In a poll that asked 4,040 smartphone users in March how many dropped calls they had experienced in the past three months, AT&T — the exclusive U.S. carrier of Apple's (AAPL) iPhone and iPad mobile devices — came in dead last among the country's four largest carriers. . . AT&T customers, by contrast, reported 4.5% of calls dropped in the last three months. That's one out of every 22 calls — three times as many as Verizon's and the worst percentage ChangeWave has ever seen.

The opinions compiled in this survey are dramatically at odds with actual quantitative results derived from millions of calls made during extensive drive-testing of the AT&T mobile broadband network by a highly respected outside firm.

Those results, from GWS, show that, on a national basis, AT&T is within just two-tenths of a percent of the industry leader in wireless call retainability. That's a difference of just two calls in a thousand, a virtual dead-heat.

In fact, the statistically valid drive test shows the AT&T network continues to deliver the nation's fastest 3G network and near best-in-class call retainability nationwide. AT&T's network dropped only 1.44 percent of calls nationwide, within two-tenths of 1 percent of the industry leader and a difference of less than two calls out of 1,000.