Re: Official Confirmation?
I was an engineer for AT&T several years back and you are right, the attitude was different. They did not care about the network, about customer support or about pricing, only about new devices. They felt their target market was 'gadget hounds' who had to always have the latest and greatest, and who could support themselves.
Its fine for what it is, but quite frankly the reason I am on Verizon is that I can live without the absolute latest and greatest if the compromise is that my network sucks and when I need customer support its crap. I don't think Verizon is awesome or anything, but having driven across country several times it is extremely rare to not have a signal, they have always been excellent when I've needed modifications to my service or lines, and while they don't have the absolute bleeding edge devices, they are usually about 3-6 months behind AT&T, and well ahead of T-Mobile or Sprint.
Its a set of tradeoffs. If my needs were different AT&T would be a potential choice. But I really can't hold it against either carrier picking a demographic and aggressively targeting it.
To be honest in the last several years Verizon customer support has taken a dive, a steep one. It's why I left, because the treatment of the CS folks was horrible and it was starting to show in the actual level of service provided to the customers. I jumped shipped before it could sink too far. I know people still there that wish they had jumped with me.
I will say that while Verizon does have the larger coverage area (which is still true) that AT&T is also catching up on that front. My sister lives practically in the middle of nowhere here in Washington State and I get a full LTE signal at her place while she gets an iffy signal with her Verizon service.
At my parents house it's a different story (and for them it's not practically it's a literal middle of nowhere) and neither has particularly great service...but they live less than a mile from a big military training area that is in the middle of farmland and dirt that has some equipment that I think interferes with their signal.
For me, I don't understand why Verizon needs the trade-off. In this day in age, Verizon should have a list of "spots" where it's best to check the ability of the phone to maintain a connection, and test the phones there. Total testing should only be a three months max. Verizon should, by virtue of their network, be able to get any phone they want, and I think most manufacturers would make sure the phone works right for them.
In other words, why can't VZW have both the latest devices and great phone service? Why compromise at all?
I can actually answer that one.
AT&T likes to reach out to the tech junkie crowd and have phones that are on the bleeding edge, which sometimes means having to wait on updates for things.
Verizon likes to either carry models that other carriers have that are either the same, rebadged versions of the same thing (for instance the Verizon XV6900 was really just an unmodified HTC Touch...serious look it up), or slightly modified versions of an existing device (the Lumia 929 is a 5" version of the Lumia 1520) so that they have a more stable device ready to go out the door.
The lag time is less than it used to be. It used to be up to 12-18 months behind, now it's usually just a few months.
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