Posted on 04/22/2017 7:05:47 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
For the first time, the nation's largest wireless provider is losing customers faster than it can replace them.
It's a major milestone for Verizon, which on Thursday reported a net decline of 289,000 cellphone subscribers over the past four months.
Even though Verizon usually loses some cellular customers every quarter, it has historically lured enough back to be able to report growth in that part of its business. But recent months have seen hundreds of thousands of customers defect to competitors such as T-Mobile and Sprint, analysts say.
Things could have been even worse if Verizon hadn't suddenly reintroduced unlimited data plans in February, according to Verizon's earnings numbers. In the first six weeks of the year, Verizon lost nearly 400,000 wireless customers, according to its latest earnings report. But once the new plans became available, they helped blunt those losses by bringing in about 110,000 new subscribers, Verizon said.
Verizon's reluctance to bring back unlimited data and its sudden about-face this year reflect rising competition in the cellular industry that is forcing large incumbents to adapt. The telecom giant has long argued that consumers are willing to pay a premium for a quality wireless experience, in contrast to budget carriers such as Sprint.
But aggressive moves by smaller carriers to build out their networks are paying off, said Roger Entner, an industry analyst with Recon Analytics, meaning that such companies as T-Mobile are chipping away at Verizon's network advantage. In a recent federal auction of wireless airwaves, T-Mobile emerged as a major beneficiary, spending $8 billion to acquire rights to radio spectrum it will use to expand its mobile Internet capacity.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
They were to spendy for me
They all suck. I hate cell phone companies with a passion. None of them deliver the service they promise. Getting help is akin to pulling teeth in a medieval torture chamber. You can’t get phone X unless you have service Y.
Pay TV companies are just as bad. We spend thousands on cell phone and pay TV service annually and they both suck horrendously. What crap. I hate them both immensely.
news google the story, and click on it from there to avoid the meter. newspaper websites exempt traffic from google news through their paywall.
I have a Trac phone (or is it fone?). The only reason I have it is my car has 200,000 miles on it and I have roadside assistance. Just put the phone in the car when I drive.
Probably only use one or two minutes a month.
As soon as my son is on his own and paying for his own plan, I'm done with those crooks.
I’d be happy to find a carrier which had a phone which wasn’t monstrous. All of them seem to be suited to watching videos but not fitting in a pocket.
I currently use Republic Wireless but their new phones are huge.
I hate that I’m forced to take them at their word about my usage. I have a MiFi (mobile WiFi hotspot) with a 6gig data plan. Two months ago they informed me that I had used 34gig the prior month. There’s no way I could have pumped that much data down the pipe unless I was streaming movies 24 hours a day (I wasn’t).
I protested and they insisted. My only recourse is to change service provider. They have us by the short hairs.
>>They all suck. I hate cell phone companies with a passion.
15+ years ago, I worked with a guy who had been involved in buildout of cellular networks in the Southeast for >10 years. The guy knew cellular telephony.
At that time, his opinion was that all cellular sucked, that it had become a complete commodity product, and you just had to pick the cellular service that sucked least in your location, for your use case, at that particular point in time.
I felt this was a spot-on correct and useful way of looking at cellular service at the time, and believe it still holds true today.
I would get rid of Verizon, but they are the only carrier that has coverage in the areas I work. Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T all suck coverage wise in SW Arizona.
I forgot to mention that my Tracfone works off a Verizon tower.
For many years there was no service here at all, then Verizon built a tower only a couple of hundred yards away.
Which I went to, Verizon wireless being my only choice for broadband out here in the sticks. Good service, good gear, only... Well, only there's a little catch. If you're using one of their wireless APs, after 10 GB a month they throttle you down from LTE4 to LTE3 and there isn't anything you can do about it. And it's very difficult to find in their user terms, and frankly I haven't managed to do that yet, and I've tried. So yeah, great idea, deceptive marketing, and an irritated customer who's checking his other options. That's what's happening to Verizon.
Don’t forget Bell Atlantic too.
Where I live in a rural area Verizon has the best coverage, but pricey. So I went with a Page Plus plan (sold by Walmart and online) which runs on the Verison network but costs less than half.
Churn is the nature of the business, a year ago Sprint was on the losing end, so they got aggressive and went after Verizon’s customers. Next year it will be different.
Have an LG cosmos 3 and Verizon’s prepaid plan unlimited text and talk for 30 dollars a month.
Cheap telephony!
Small rays of light peeked through the cracks of phone, internet and TV carriers as consumers sought alternatives at various moments. The old guard faltered then reasserted their monopolies and oligopolies by buying out the upstarts and/or getting regulations passed that only they could comply with (cronyism).
In 1980 we had AT&T and Warner Cable. In 2017 we have AT&T and Warner Cable aka Spectrum. This isn’t how it was supposed to evolve.
amazing how much venom a wireless carrier can generate.
yeah, their customer service sucks — because it can afford to suck. they have 3 bars on the moon, and two bars on mars.
I get a better signal with my TracFone than my Verizon phone.
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