Customers switching to AT&T because of the iPhone
From what I've read, about half of the new iPhone
buyers are switchers from other carriers, and about half of those from
Verizon...
I've blogged in the past about how much I can't
stand the business practices of Verizon. And up until my wife purchased an
iPhone for me as a birthday gift, I was watching from the sidelines and cheering
every time I saw evidence of how Verizon may be impacted by their decision to
walk away from Apple's iPhone
offer.
Here's another case in point about why I hate Verizon. Prior to the iPhone purchase last week, my family had 4 Verizon cell phones. Actually 3 phones and a digital USB modem which my wife uses when traveling with her Mac Book Pro. All the phones were on one contract with Verizon. The family plan contract is under my wife's name and phone number. We want to have some credit-related activity in her name and this is a perfectly fine choice.
When Melissa purchased the iPhone for me (while she was away visiting family in Cincinnati) she inquired with Verizon what contract impact implications there would be if we dropped my phone from the family plan. Since we were dropping a line, we really were not breaking a phone contract, and my old Motorola V710 from Verizon was long ago cycled through their contract system and paid for.
After I activated my new iPhone on AT&T, which was painless and easy to execute through iTunes, my Verizon number rolled over to where I could accept calls on the next business day. All very straight-forward and it probably would have been sooner except that I activated the iPhone on a Saturday evening and had to wait until Monday morning before I started to receive calls.
Then a few days later while she was looking on-line at the Verizon statement she observed two things. The first was that somehow the contract with Verizon was extended for 2 years. Extended after dropping a phone line on an old uninsured phone. The second thing she saw was that they continued to bill for use of my phone line for a standard new month even though the transfer had just happened at the end of the billing cycle.
So she called them up and asked them who our attorney should talk to about them changing our contract without communicating that it would. They put a manager on the phone and apologized for the misunderstanding and clerical error. The extra charges could not be dropped because they were already automatically paid, but the said they would issue a credit for the billed but unused phone line. And the contract was not supposed to renew because of dropping a line.
I'm convinced from this experience and quite a few others that it's easy to believe that they know most people are not paying close attention to their cell phone billing activity.
And then just a few days ago I received a phone call from Verizon Customer Service on my iPhone and they asked to speak with my wife. I said, that this was the wrong number for her and would they like to have it? The person I spoke to said that no, they had it on file and would call her number instead. So after completing the call I telephoned her to let her know that for some reason Verizon was trying to reach her. A few hours passed and no one called her. So she calls up Verizon customer service and no one there claims to have called her. Well, they're a big company so I can see how the transaction record may have been poorly communicated. But then she starts talking to them and it turns out that Verizon was trying to make a special offer to get me to please return to Verizon from AT&T. I think they called my number to confirm it was really on AT&T's network?
It was all very interesting to experience. But now on to my speculations...
Apple hasn't posted any figures on how iPhone sales are doing. Or at least I think they haven't. It's been 2 weeks now. I read some reports that they sold 700,000 iPhones in the first 3 days. If that's true it's not hard to guess that they have sold at least a million so far. And I've read that somewhere between 25% and 51% of iPhone buyers have switched to AT&T. In one report I read, the estimate was that 25% buyers were former Verizon customers.
So that means that Verizon has somewhere between 120,000 and 250,000 that switched to AT&T with the iPhone. Now I'm guessing the average cell phone bill is about $50 / month. Playing it really conservative, that's $72 Million in lost revenue per year. And that's only after the first few weeks of sales. Now I freely admit this is all wild-ass speculation, but that's a lot of money. And if I'm playing it safe that might be less than half the real figures.
So I'm inclined to believe that Verizon has to stop and take notice.
I should probably make some comments about using the phone now for about a week. First off, it's amazing. It feels like such an elegant design (and I love a great software system) running on some very cool hardware. The integration of data and applications reminds me of the old Newtons. The touch screen is working really well for me now. When I find myself just typing quickly and trusting it's word matching software I can create really quick e-mail messages. The camera is great. I believe the real sleeper application, the one that will be the launching board for the future is the integrated web browser. The mobile version of Safari works so well that I have mostly stopped using my personal notebook for daily web reading now. It's just too convenient to call up web sites with the iPhone. And it works like a real web browser. Some plug-ins are needed. Currently there is no support for Macromedia Flash, nor Java. I imagine that Apple engineers (and perhaps Sun and Adobe) are working hard at a software update for the iPhone. The e-mail client works great and is very handy. I'm using Yahoo mail for messages authored from my iPhone. I read my Yahoo, G-Mail and Cox Net e-mail all from the phone. I just have it configured to update every 30 minutes.
The iPod built into the iPhone is very nice. I love that huge crisp video display where I have watched several episodes of Battlestar Galactica now. The contacts management and voice mail operations is very nicely done. Before owning one I speculated that 8GB was way too small. But you know, I've noticed that I'm quite happy building subset playlists for Podcasts and music genres that I want to have loaded and on-hand. It's quite functional. Battery life has been surprisingly good. The first few days I had the iPhone I used it nearly constantly - and did a lot of demos when people saw it (this still happens almost daily). Those first few days it would run about 12 hours before I got the 20% battery warning. After about a week where I'm still listening to music and podcasts during my commute and lunch time, and getting SMS messages, email and web browsing several times a day most the day long, the battery last an entire day for me.
From what I've read there were some errors in battery life reports on the 'Net, mostly originating from C-Net where they had a misleading article. The straight scoop is that the battery is supposed to last about 400 full cycles before the battery is reduced to 80% storage capacity. That means a year from now it should hold about 10 hours charge.
Coverage is a concern I had before switching. Verizon has excellent coverage everywhere I am located. Well, all except for one instance so far, AT&T coverage has been just fine. The only exception was the local Super Target store near my home. Now I've had dropped calls on Verizon pretty often while inside that store but usually calls work within the entire store. My AT&T service is almost non-existant in the Super Target. Only when I went over to the sporting goods section did I get a signal (and it was an interesting "Step Function" because it went from no signal to a strong signal in one small area of their store). So that's one place where coverage is not as good. We'll see how it works for me when I travel back and forth between Nebraska and Ohio later this summer.
So my conclusions so far, this is an amazing device for a version 1.0. I'm guessing that a software update is coming and should be interesting. There are a number of tweaks and features I'd like to see Apple and AT&T address, but even if they never do, I'm quite satisfied with this phone. I'll post more about it as time goes by. After all, it's only a few weeks old.
Here's another case in point about why I hate Verizon. Prior to the iPhone purchase last week, my family had 4 Verizon cell phones. Actually 3 phones and a digital USB modem which my wife uses when traveling with her Mac Book Pro. All the phones were on one contract with Verizon. The family plan contract is under my wife's name and phone number. We want to have some credit-related activity in her name and this is a perfectly fine choice.
When Melissa purchased the iPhone for me (while she was away visiting family in Cincinnati) she inquired with Verizon what contract impact implications there would be if we dropped my phone from the family plan. Since we were dropping a line, we really were not breaking a phone contract, and my old Motorola V710 from Verizon was long ago cycled through their contract system and paid for.
After I activated my new iPhone on AT&T, which was painless and easy to execute through iTunes, my Verizon number rolled over to where I could accept calls on the next business day. All very straight-forward and it probably would have been sooner except that I activated the iPhone on a Saturday evening and had to wait until Monday morning before I started to receive calls.
Then a few days later while she was looking on-line at the Verizon statement she observed two things. The first was that somehow the contract with Verizon was extended for 2 years. Extended after dropping a phone line on an old uninsured phone. The second thing she saw was that they continued to bill for use of my phone line for a standard new month even though the transfer had just happened at the end of the billing cycle.
So she called them up and asked them who our attorney should talk to about them changing our contract without communicating that it would. They put a manager on the phone and apologized for the misunderstanding and clerical error. The extra charges could not be dropped because they were already automatically paid, but the said they would issue a credit for the billed but unused phone line. And the contract was not supposed to renew because of dropping a line.
I'm convinced from this experience and quite a few others that it's easy to believe that they know most people are not paying close attention to their cell phone billing activity.
And then just a few days ago I received a phone call from Verizon Customer Service on my iPhone and they asked to speak with my wife. I said, that this was the wrong number for her and would they like to have it? The person I spoke to said that no, they had it on file and would call her number instead. So after completing the call I telephoned her to let her know that for some reason Verizon was trying to reach her. A few hours passed and no one called her. So she calls up Verizon customer service and no one there claims to have called her. Well, they're a big company so I can see how the transaction record may have been poorly communicated. But then she starts talking to them and it turns out that Verizon was trying to make a special offer to get me to please return to Verizon from AT&T. I think they called my number to confirm it was really on AT&T's network?
It was all very interesting to experience. But now on to my speculations...
Apple hasn't posted any figures on how iPhone sales are doing. Or at least I think they haven't. It's been 2 weeks now. I read some reports that they sold 700,000 iPhones in the first 3 days. If that's true it's not hard to guess that they have sold at least a million so far. And I've read that somewhere between 25% and 51% of iPhone buyers have switched to AT&T. In one report I read, the estimate was that 25% buyers were former Verizon customers.
So that means that Verizon has somewhere between 120,000 and 250,000 that switched to AT&T with the iPhone. Now I'm guessing the average cell phone bill is about $50 / month. Playing it really conservative, that's $72 Million in lost revenue per year. And that's only after the first few weeks of sales. Now I freely admit this is all wild-ass speculation, but that's a lot of money. And if I'm playing it safe that might be less than half the real figures.
So I'm inclined to believe that Verizon has to stop and take notice.
I should probably make some comments about using the phone now for about a week. First off, it's amazing. It feels like such an elegant design (and I love a great software system) running on some very cool hardware. The integration of data and applications reminds me of the old Newtons. The touch screen is working really well for me now. When I find myself just typing quickly and trusting it's word matching software I can create really quick e-mail messages. The camera is great. I believe the real sleeper application, the one that will be the launching board for the future is the integrated web browser. The mobile version of Safari works so well that I have mostly stopped using my personal notebook for daily web reading now. It's just too convenient to call up web sites with the iPhone. And it works like a real web browser. Some plug-ins are needed. Currently there is no support for Macromedia Flash, nor Java. I imagine that Apple engineers (and perhaps Sun and Adobe) are working hard at a software update for the iPhone. The e-mail client works great and is very handy. I'm using Yahoo mail for messages authored from my iPhone. I read my Yahoo, G-Mail and Cox Net e-mail all from the phone. I just have it configured to update every 30 minutes.
The iPod built into the iPhone is very nice. I love that huge crisp video display where I have watched several episodes of Battlestar Galactica now. The contacts management and voice mail operations is very nicely done. Before owning one I speculated that 8GB was way too small. But you know, I've noticed that I'm quite happy building subset playlists for Podcasts and music genres that I want to have loaded and on-hand. It's quite functional. Battery life has been surprisingly good. The first few days I had the iPhone I used it nearly constantly - and did a lot of demos when people saw it (this still happens almost daily). Those first few days it would run about 12 hours before I got the 20% battery warning. After about a week where I'm still listening to music and podcasts during my commute and lunch time, and getting SMS messages, email and web browsing several times a day most the day long, the battery last an entire day for me.
From what I've read there were some errors in battery life reports on the 'Net, mostly originating from C-Net where they had a misleading article. The straight scoop is that the battery is supposed to last about 400 full cycles before the battery is reduced to 80% storage capacity. That means a year from now it should hold about 10 hours charge.
Coverage is a concern I had before switching. Verizon has excellent coverage everywhere I am located. Well, all except for one instance so far, AT&T coverage has been just fine. The only exception was the local Super Target store near my home. Now I've had dropped calls on Verizon pretty often while inside that store but usually calls work within the entire store. My AT&T service is almost non-existant in the Super Target. Only when I went over to the sporting goods section did I get a signal (and it was an interesting "Step Function" because it went from no signal to a strong signal in one small area of their store). So that's one place where coverage is not as good. We'll see how it works for me when I travel back and forth between Nebraska and Ohio later this summer.
So my conclusions so far, this is an amazing device for a version 1.0. I'm guessing that a software update is coming and should be interesting. There are a number of tweaks and features I'd like to see Apple and AT&T address, but even if they never do, I'm quite satisfied with this phone. I'll post more about it as time goes by. After all, it's only a few weeks old.
Posted: Wednesday - July 18, 2007 at 11:46 PM |
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Published On: Jan 19, 2008 09:36 PM
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Published On: Jan 19, 2008 09:36 PM