"Fewest Dropped Calls" Somewhere Else:
On my usual route home from work, I pass a Cingular billboard on I-271 south (just before exit 23) proclaiming Cingular has the "fewest dropped calls" of any cell carrier in the nation. This claim might or might not be true. Either way, I find the billboard's placement quite amusing, as Cingular's cell coverage is spotty on that stretch of 271, and my phone drops calls there all of the time. I would have thought Cingular would be more careful not to advertise where its ad claims would be so inconsistent with consumer experience.
Meanwhile, or 25 cents per minute Virgin phone had service most everywhere.
When we saw the "fewest dropped calls" billboards on our trip, our joke was "that's because they have no service in this area to begin with."
P.S.: I shoudl note that Cingular did have "roaming" service in some of the "no service" spots. But we don't choose to pay $2.00 per minute for our phone conversations.
My house is located on a well traveled Interstate, but because it faces other houses located at slightly higher elevations, Cingular service is non existant.
When I called the carrier to complain he stated that if I lived a block down I would have had service !!! What arrogance !
Maybe Verizon or some other competitor is secretly installing jammers on these billboards??? Maybe???
I'm wondering if you had a go phone(which does not cover all of the places that regular contracted cell phone service does)...because Cingular doesn't have any roaming charges on its contracted service...but hey people always wanna complain about something I've had the service for years and never had any problems..
When my friend is visiting from San Francisco, we have to use my cell phone to contact her, otherwise, my other friend's phones have to make a long distance call to her SanFran #, even if she's just wandered away in the mall.
So it will be back to our Virgin Mobile - cell phones to be used only for brief calls or in emergencies. And that's fine with us. And much better coverage.
The claim is technically correct. Problem is, the commercial defines the Cingular network differently than normal people define it. A third party surveyed the Cingular network as defined before the merger between Cingular and AT&T Wireless (AWS) and limited itself to the GSM part of the network. (The survey occurred after the merger, but it limited itself to towers that were operating in the same way as they were before the merger.)
So a full disclosure version would be "The GSM part of the Cingular network that existed previous to the merger with AT&T Wireless had fewer dropped calls to a statistically significant degree." The integration with the AWS network caused many changes and much shifting around: turn this tower off, make this one GSM, network these two computers that did not talk to each other previously, etc. The network referred to in the commercials, for all practical intents and purposes, no longer exists. This new badly, but throughly, integrated network is the one you folks are using to place calls.