Sprint needs to run a few extra laps, to catch up with the carrier pack. While Skydeck research shows that overall the majority of consumers (68%) are positive about their carrier’s performance, Sprint is consistently lagging behind Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. Here are four supporting examples from our research:
1) General satisfaction: Is my carrier fair and honest? Are bills predictable? Would I recommend them… or switch?
For these questions, Verizon fairs the best, receiving positive feedback from 75% of its customers and negative feedback from only 9%. T-Mobile and AT&T receive negative marks from 12% of their customers, while Sprint’s customers were unsatisfied 19% of the time.
Skydeck isn’t working with Google. We’ve read the same articles and heard the same rumors that you have. So these are just educated guesses. But everybody else is doing it, so why not us?
Presidential primaries are drawing near and pollsters are dialing up homes from New York to Los Angeles to test which way the political wind is blowing. But who is picking up the phone? (more…)
Two of us just received a notice from Verizon Wireless about CPNI. CPNI stands for Customer Proprietary Network Information: our call records, essentially. What numbers we called, how often, how long we spent on the phone, and how much it cost us. (It does not include our own names, numbers, or addresses.)
Verizon wants to share this data with third parties, and of course they need our permission: “you have a right, and we have a duty, under federal and state law, to protect the confidentiality of your CPNI.”
But that duty only goes so far: “Unless you provide us [Verizon Wireless] with notice that you wish to opt out within 30 days of receiving this letter, we will assume that you give the Verizon Companies the right to share your CPNI with the authorized companies as described above.”
Last week was an interesting week for open access. Sprint re-affirmed that their new WiMax network will support any device and that customers will not be forced into long-term contracts. Sprint shared location information with a third-party mobile web site for the first time. (There would be many more location-based services in the US if cell phone companies allowed developers to get at the data.) And Cubic Telecom, an Irish startup, launched a low-cost international dialing service that would not be possible without open access.
But while the fanboys devoted all their attention to the iPhone again, I believe that the most important story last week was about a simple text messaging campaign on Verizon Wireless.
Rather than write yetanotheressay on the importance of open access for wireless, here’s a video of my testimony to the FCC on July 31, the day the Commission voted in favor of the rules for the auction.
It took much longer than we expected, but there are now at least four reported solutions for unlocking an iPhone, two of them requiring softwareonly. (Apple and AT&T needn’t worry about techniques that demand a soldering iron.)
Several people have claimed that these hacks, though obviously bad for AT&T, are good for Apple, because Apple gets to sell more iPhones.
Wrong.
In return for exclusivity, Apple has negotiated a share of the monthly service revenue - up to 10% by some accounts. The iPhone starts at $499, and Apple’s margin on the initial sale may be 50%, or $250. Let’s assume the average iPhone bill is $100 per month (about twice the national average). 10% of $100 per month on a two-year contract is $240, and Apple’s margin on that revenue is near 100%. That would be enough to double Apple’s profit on the sale of the phone. And why stop at two years? How many years have you owned an iPod? (more…)
Posted by: Dan
Posted by: Jason
