Waiting on hold for an hour and 20 minutes to talk to a real person with Cingular Wireless cellphone customer service was the last straw for Dave Dehlin, 49, a Newmont Mining employee.
He hung up and switched to T-Mobile “shortly thereafter.” As an added bonus, Dehlin said, he got better coverage at his Highlands Ranch home.
“With T-Mobile, you call them up and maybe wait five minutes,” Dehlin said. “I think the coverage is better. Even in Denver, there are a lot of dead spots for T-Mobile, but there are a lot more for Cingular.”
Plenty of other cellphone users agree with Dehlin about Cingular’s service in Denver, according to Consumer Reports, which released its annual survey on cellphones Monday. The independent nonprofit organization, which publishes Consumer Reports magazine, said 50,515 of its subscribers responded to the survey of cellphone service in 18 metro markets.
Atlanta-based Cingular, a joint venture of AT&T Corp. and BellSouth Corp., ranked lowest in customer satisfaction in Denver, with a rating of 60 out of 100 among the respondents who answered questions in September. It generally ranked near the bottom in other cities, too, from Atlanta to Washington, D.C.
Verizon ranked best in Denver, with a rating of 71, and was the market leader in all but one of the cities surveyed – Chicago – where it was edged out by US Cellular. T-Mobile finished second in Denver with a 65, followed by Sprint PCS with a 64.
The survey ranked customer responses for no service, full circuits, dropped calls and static.
For cellphone service in general, only 47 percent of users said they were satisfied, according to Consumer Reports.
Cingular, which advertises itself as “most reliable,” said testers checking coverage in Denver and Boulder find service to be fine. Cingular is adding 60 new cell sites in Colorado this year, said Anne Marshall, a Cingular spokeswoman.
Cingular expected to invest $60 million for new towers and equipment in its Denver cellphone network between July 2005 and July 2006.
Verizon spent $107 million in Colorado in 2004 to build its network – and it shows, said Bob Kelley, a Verizon-Colorado spokesman. Nationwide, Verizon added 1.9 million new customers in the third quarter, about double that of Cingular, Kelley said.
Sprint has spent at least $78 million in Colorado in the past two years, beefing up its network and buying Qwest’s Colorado wireless operations.
“Verizon has made a choice to invest heavily in customer service while T-Mobile has said it wants to be the lowest price,” said Phil Weiser, a telecommunications professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Cingular has tried to emulate Verizon, which you see in its new campaign, ‘raising the bar.”‘
Cell-service problems have stayed the same for the past few years, mainly because the number of wireless customers has grown as fast or faster than the networks. U.S. wireless investment hit $174 billion in 2004, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association.
Not all Denver customers agree with the Consumer Reports ranking. Russ Martino, 32, said he jokes with a colleague all the time about how bad Verizon’s coverage is, compared with his T-Mobile service in Denver.
“He has Verizon, and it (stinks),” Martino said.
Business customer Danny Stallsworth, 61, of Keenesburg, said he’s pretty happy with his three Cingular phones but was enticed by wireless Internet recently advertised by Verizon.
“Verizon has it in town, and it’s pretty high-speed,” Stallsworth said as he waited to talk to a Cingular customer-service representative at its store on Denver’s 16th Street Mall. “I was looking at Verizon, but Cingular works fine.”
Staff writer Beth Potter can be reached at 303-820-1503 or bpotter@denverpost.com.
