J.D. Power report released. Hey Sprint – about that 1% you’re claiming…
J.D. Power released a study highlighting the incidence of wireless network problems being driven in urban areas by young high usage customers, but it also has a fairly interesting series of reports and graphs on problems per 100 mobile network connections which seem to indicate that Sprint isn’t within 1% of Verizon in any region of the US in terms of network reliability.
Sprint spent a lot of money getting the Verizon Guy’s face on my TV over and over again during the Olympics telling me that Sprint was now within 1% of Verizon.
In the Northeast region Verizon scored 10 problems per 100 calls, Sprint scored 15. The lower the score the better.
Mid Atlantic shows Verizon at 8, Sprint at 13. Southeast region shows Verizon 8, Sprint 12. North Central Verizon 8, Sprint 11. Southwest Verizon 9, Sprint 11. West Verizon 10, Sprint 13.
By the J.D. Power survey, the closest in any region Sprint gets to Verizon is the Southwest where it trails in reliability only by 2%.
I wrote a little bit about what exactly a 1% difference entailed, but this is an average of a 3.66% difference across the US, or for every year of theoretical calls you’re missing Hanukkah and Christmas day (13.359 days).
You can see the J.D. Power study in its entirety here.
Of course Sprint will claim that their paid for independant drive study works differently than J.D. Power’s study, but I’m going to believe J.D. personally.
Another interesting thing I learned in the J.D. Power study that they emailed me is the contact names and email addresses of almost everyone J.D. Power Media Relations contacts in the web world. You’d think by 2016 BCC would be the default :)
