J.D. Power finds Spint, AT&T lacking

Yes, it’s that time a year again. J.D. Power and his associates have released their first customer service survey for the wireless industry in 2008. The survey is broken down into regions: Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, North Central, Southwest, and West. I’ll wait until after the jump to post the winners. But here’s a bit of a spoiler: Sprint didn’t win any. Okay, so maybe that was a bit predictable. How about this? AT&T didn’t win any. Ooh. Good one.

Alltel took two regions by themselves, the Southeast and the West. However, like Carl Yastrzemski in 1967, they couldn’t get the third one by their lonesome. Instead, they shared the Southwest region with T-Mobile. Verizon headed the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, while U.S. Cellular got the North Central region.

The study also found that CDMA technology is cause for fewer call quality problems, coming in at about 3 problems-per-100-calls than those using GSM networks. iDEN, predictably, had the most problems.

“CDMA technology is generally considered to be more efficient for processing wireless calls, as it requires fewer cell sites to handle call volume compared with other wireless platforms,” said Kirk Parsons, senior director of wireless services at J.D. Power and Associates. “Additionally, major service providers that use the CDMA platform, such as Alltel and Verizon Wireless, typically perform better, with fewer initial disconnects, more on-time text messages, and less interference and static. However, while CDMA is certainly advantageous, this technology alone does not necessarily guarantee fewer call quality problems. Locating, operating and managing complex network systems all require expertise from both the service carriers and their supporting network vendors to optimize call quality performance.”

Pretty common sense stuff. Also from the common sense department, those with 3G phones experience fewer problems than those who do not have such devices.

You can check out the region-by-region scores here. Another spoilers: AT&T and Sprint are the bottom two in every region, splitting last and second to last place finishes.

Filed under : Cell Phone Service