VERIZON iPHONE USERS HAVE LESS DROPPED CALLS THAN THOSE AT AT&T

Market research firm ChangeWave on Tuesday released the findings of a recent study analyzing iPhone 4 owner experiences and owner satisfaction. The study pitted Verizon Wireless’ iPhone 4 against the same model from AT&T, and sought to compare consumer experiences with the device at each carrier. Following years of complaints regarding poor service and dropped calls on AT&T, the question on everyone’s mind following the iPhone’s launch with Verizon Wireless was whether or not service quality would improve.

According to ChangeWave’s findings, the answer is yes. In a survey of 4,068 customers, ChangeWave found that over the past 90 days, Verizon Wireless iPhone 4 users have dropped approximately 1.8% of calls while AT&T iPhone 4 owners dropped 4.8% of calls. Of course Verizon’s iPhone hasn’t even been on the market for 90 days and calling habits and frequency were not taken into account, so the results do become somewhat suspect. What’s more, ChangeWave notes that its survey started “several weeks after Verizon began offering the iPhone 4,” so we could be looking at just over a month of anecdotal Verizon Wireless data being compared to three months of anecdotal AT&T data. ChangeWave also found that Verizon Wireless iPhone owners are slightly more satisfied than AT&T iPhone 4 owners, with 82% saying they were very satisfied compared to 80% for AT&T.

VERIZON DROPS 10k 911 CALLS DURING JANUARY SNOWPOCALYPSE IN DC

Verizon likes to bill itself as having the best network in the US (and that’s generally accepted to be true), but it looks like even they have problems when times get tough. According to a Bloomberg report, the FCC has posted a letter to Verizon Wireless saying that the carrier dropped as many as 10,000 calls to 911 during the January 26th blizzard in the Washington, DC area.

That would be a serious enough problem on its own, but the FCC is concerned that this could be happening during other emergencies across the country and affecting many more of Verizon’s 90+ million subscribers.

The Federal Communications Commission has sent a letter to Verizon asking them to investigate the incident and presumedly get to the bottom on the issue. The FCC described the number of dropped calls during the blizzard “truly alarming” and for their part Verizon says they are investigating but part of the problem was due to the high volume of calls over a short period of time. They are working with the counties involved to make sure it doesn’t happen again.