AT&T, Cingular, and Colbert

Boyum pointed me to this video, which gives a mostly-complete overview of what happened.

Wireless phone carrier quality comparisons

So Cingular has been bragging about their fewest dropped calls on commercials lately. They say "based on nationwide experience among national carriers." The interesting thing is their press release web site lists a smaller area. They have some others, but more generally and also for smaller areas. They just say two companies without saying which. Apparently someone actually tried to get more info from them. Looks like Global Wireless Solutions and Telephia. It seems both companies do call testing with test calls, and note that while call quality and attempts are tested, only dropped calls are mentioned in the ads and press release. The GWS guy also didn't give details but didn't have issues with Cingular's claims. Even if they aren't hiding anything, not releasing their sources seems really suspicious (especially since they did before - why would their contracts with the survey company suddenly not allow releasing it?).

What's also interesting is that just over two weeks ago J.D. Power and Associates released a report with detailed information on the major nationwide and regional carriers, with ranking figures (at the bottom) and descriptions of why (in the middle). This isn't just based on test data either, but on interviewing customers. Guess where Cingular falls on that one? You can get detailed info. T-mobile also is bragging, but they're willing to cite their sources.

There is some good news for those Orange customers in MN though (guessing as usual Blue customers won't get access to the upgrades). Hopefully it'll get VZW to react.

What's up with AT&T?

Or is it at&t now? Assuming nobody puts a stop to it, AT&T is buying out BellSouth. For those not paying attention, that means that of the 7 Bells resulting from the original AT&T split, 4 of them are back under the long distance company, and Verizon has the rest except for Qwest having the old USWest. I guess 3 is better than 1 at least, although the bundling the local lines with other things is worse in my opinion than covering larger areas.

Of course that also means that BellSouth won't be complaining about dropping the Cingular name anymore either. Back in November when SBC bought AT&T and changed their name, they said they'd change from Cingular back to AT&T as a brand. Of course with their campaign to move to Cingular and claiming it's better, everyone wondered how long it'd be before they actually tried it. Of course BellSouth owned 40% and was pissed but couldn't do much about it. Now that's out of the picture, but everyone still seems to agree it's a bad idea (last part of article).

It'll be interesting to see what all this happening does to the customer bases. It seems a lot of Cingular customers had no clue that the company eventually plans to change the name again. They're also still losing ground on customers. Add on top of that the new warnings about off network use and in at least one case I know telling people they have a month to switch to another company because the account is costing them too much. Then the big northeast outage tonight... Hopefully that's not going back to their old pre-merger history of not being able to keep the network running. I've been saying for a while that Cingular needs to really improve, primarily to become a competitor with Verizon on something other than cost. Once that happens both companies should improve for customers. Hopefully that'll happen sooner than later, although all this buying companies can't be good for the cash they could be dumping into network upgrades.