Wireless Cellular Phone Providers: Can be Capitalism at Work

As cell phones have climbed to the stratosphere on the list of "must-have" personal technologies, all the major wireless cell phone providers have done their best to advertise themselves as the most reliable and user-friendly of their kind, in the hopes of carving out a larger chunk of the estimate three billion cell phone subscriptions.

The reality of telecommunications technology is that the quality of reception produced by the same wireless cell phone provider can differ greatly within a small geographical area. Until a group of people signs up with every wireless cell phone provider in every part of the US, and devote their lives to making and reporting the quality of thousands of calls, there will be no comprehensive data on which wireless cell phone provider has an edge on the rest.

The big four of the US wireless cell phone providers, Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T (formerly Cingular) and Sprint Nextel, have now been joined in the battle for market share by regional wireless cell phone providers like MetroPCS, Alltell and US Cellular. But has any one of them done any thing to distinguish itself as the best of the wireless cell phone providers from a customer’s standpoint?

The problem with relying on the impressions of consumers to determine which is the best wireless cell phone provider is that many of the larger providers have millions of subscribers and therefore have many more customers willing to rate them. That may put them at a disadvantage to the smaller regional sites, which may get excellent ratings, but only from a few customers.

One way, therefore, to judge which of the US' wireless cell phone providers currently has the best performance record is to read the online reviews posted by customers of the different providers, or to visit consumer advocate sites which have done their own independent testing and drawn unbiased conclusions

CNET, for instance, has gathered data which shows that as of September 2007, of the six wireless cell phone carries which their readers have rated, Allnet has the highest ranking. But it also has had only 23 people rank it, far less than more than 400 which rated AT&T lowest. But AT&T has tens of millions of subscribers, so how much weight should be given the opinions of a mere 400 plus of them? For more information on cell phone providers and camera cell phones visit http://www.highenergymagic.com

And what some cell phone users may not realize is that their wireless cell phone provider may actually piggyback on the signals of another wireless carrier in the areas where it does not have a widespread customer base. T-Mobile, for instance, has roaming agreements with AT&T, so if T-Mobile calls are being dropped in a specific area, the droppage might be due to a problem with the AT&T service.

The state of the wireless cell phone providers today is such that tmost of cell phone users, most of the time, can call the people they need to call regardless of their location, and be confident that their calls will not be dropped. That, to many minds, ought to be enough. But competition is the consumer’s friend, and there is likely to be a continuing growth in the number of regional wireless cell phone providers in the US to keep the bigger providers on their toes!