AT&T More Bars in More Places

Having had wireless service from nearly every major cellular service provider, I can accurately reflect on the pros and cons of each provider and my experience with them. Being happy with a wireless provider these days goes beyond just the caliber of the wireless service. It can be argued that they are all pretty much the same but in practice, we find that that simply isn’t true.

To put it in perspective, over the years, I have had service with Alltel, Nextel, Cingular, Bellsouth Mobility, Verizon and AT&T.

By far, my favorite has been AT&T Wireless.

With all of the commotion recently over whose map covers a larger area, all of the attacks at AT&T over delayed MMS functionality with the iPhone and the dropped call issues, you may wonder how anyone could be happy with AT&T. Allow me to explain how from a satisfied AT&T Wireless customer.

There are three essential elements that combine to formulate our opinions on a wireless provider and they are:

1. Quality of Customer Service
2. Quality of signal (call quality)
3. Product selection

Honestly, it all began with my initial experience many years ago. It has since compounded from there. Simply put, the level of customer service provided by AT&T is simply unmatched by any other wireless carrier and by very few other companies, period. If you want to experience true Ritz-Carlton level service, start dealing with AT&T. Apple and AT&T must share the same trainers because the quality of customer service at an AT&T Wireless store or 800 number is on par with the caliber of service you get at an Apple Store.

That being said, the customer service front is simply the first impression. The service still has to work.

And work, it does.

Have I ever had a dropped call?

Sure, with every wireless service provider I have ever had. It simply goes with the territory that at some point, something is going to interrupt the wireless signal. It isn’t indigenous to AT&T. That being said, I often look to see if their slogan is right and I truly do have more bars in more places. Overwhelmingly, the answer has been yes. In addition to having service for my iPhone, I also have a cellular modem for my laptop so I can work wherever I am. Have I ever had a problem with it? No.

Once you get beyond customer service and signal quality, the next thing we look at is product availability. I read an article last year depicting how personal our cell phones have become. In addition to functionality, as consumers we now look for products with which we can identify that represent the essence of who we are.

And this is where AT&T absolutely knocked it out of the park with their strategic alliance with Apple to bring the iPhone into the fold. The Apple iPhone is the quintessential game changer thanks to the addition of the App Store. Never before has any mobile device been able to have such personalized capability or flexibility in what it could do. As the ads state, if you can think of it, “there’s an app for that”. My iPhone has enabled me to stop carrying around an HP12C financial calculator because, you guessed it, there’s an app for that. My iTunes library is more than 150GB in size. So, to have access to all of my music on a 16GB or 32GB device is impossible, right? Nope, again, there’s an app for that. I can listen to my entire music collection wherever I am without taking up the first byte of memory on my iPhone. Same thing with my 100s of GB worth of photos. All accessible from my iPhone via two simple apps, Simplify Music 2 and Simplify Photo. I can go on for days.

The bottom line is that AT&T Wireless provides the very best level of customer service, great signal and call quality and the killer app called the iPhone.

What’s not to love?