Thursday, January 29, 2004

According to the FCC, AT&T Wireless has been cited for the most WLNP complaints:

"AT&T Wireless was cited in the most complaints with 2,297; Sprint PCS received 1,119 complaints; Verizon Wireless received 739; Cingular Wireless L.L.C. was mentioned in 699; T-Mobile USA Inc. received 625 complaints; Nextel Communications Inc. was cited in 332 complaints; Qwest Communications International Inc. got 195 complaints and Alltel Corp. got 119 complaints. "

Ouch!
This is an article from Reuters that discusses Verizon's 14.6% increase in quarterly revenue and 1.5 customer adds (for a total of 37.5 million). Also significant is their churn rate, which dropped to 1.7% (compared with 2.1% last year), and total profit of $307M, up from $206M last year.

Another key item in the article is Verizon's CEO, Ivan Sidenberg, encouraging Vodafone (which owns 45% of Verizon) to shed its stake in favor of an AT&T Wireless takeover.

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Merger mania is really taking hold in the wireless space. In addition to the fact that AWE is actively soliciting a buyer, all sorts of rumors are floating around, including a possible purchase of Sprint PCS by VZW. The latter I tend to discount, since that would be a merger of truly epic proportions, but you can never rule it out, especially since the two companies have a long history of partnership. IMHO, a VZW/Sprint merger would be great (especially since I am a VZW customer that would potentially benefit!).

Other merger rumors that I don't believe include Nextel buying AWE (why? their technologies are pretty much incompatible).
This is the newsletter for Vocalabs, which rates the cellular carriers in terms of voice quality, customer sat, etc. This report definitely bears out my decision to switch to VZW, which came out on top in just about every category.

Vocal Laboratories Inc. Newsletter
Although I haven't documented it here, I switched from AT&T Wireless to Verizon back in December due to exactly the problems that this article references. Seems to me that IT glitches that cost AWE $100M in lost revenue, etc., should have been resolved just a little bit more quickly (that's assuming that they HAVE been solved), especially if they were planning to sell the company!

BUYER BEWARE: AT&T WIRELESS REELING FROM IT PROBLEMS
This blog is dedicated to all things "cellular": carriers, phones, shades (just kidding), etc.