Or he must think I’m a moron because he expects me to believe several blatantly false things.
From Business Insider:
So how will AT&T, the iPhone’s exclusive carrier for the last three years, deal with that when it happens?
Will customers flee in droves?
Probably not, AT&T wireless CEO Ralph de la Vega said this morning at the JPMorgan tech conference (without formally confirming that iPhone exclusivity is ending). Why not? Because switching carriers is still pretty tricky to do.
If that were the case AT&T wouldn’t have added any customers because of the iPhone. To expect that people won’t leave AT&T in droves the instant Verizon gets the iPhone is just stupid.
Then there’s this math fail:
70% of AT&T’s customers are on family plans, which is a pain in the butt to move everyone over to a new carrier, de la Vega said.
40% of customers are on corporate discount plans, which are also a pain to let go of.
That’s 110%. While it might work in sports, here in the real world we like to keep our percentages more reality based. Those numbers also leave out the percentage of customers who have neither a family plan nor a corporate discount. Sounds like he’s just making it up as he goes along.
So just as AT&T has never been able to get more than roughly 40% of each quarter’s U.S. iPhone buyers to switch over from other carriers, it’s unlikely that huge numbers AT&T’s iPhone customers will rush out the door if a Verizon iPhone hits the market.
So, almost 50% of sales each quarter are people switching from other carriers? That indicates a HUGE potential churn rate. If I were AT&T I’d be scared shitless of ANY other carrier getting the iPhone in the US.
No wonder AT&T Wireless sucks. It’s run by a retard.
And a massive fail for Business Insider for printing this crap uncritically.
Those numbers aren’t exclusive, you can be on a family plan and still get a corporate discount so the numbers could potentially work, but they still don’t make sense. Most corporations big enough to have cell phone provider discounts for their employees have discounts among more than one carrier, so it’s not likely that employer X only provides discounts for AT&T without also having deals with Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. As for the difficulty in switching networks with a family plan, yeah it can be a pain in the ass if you’re the one doing it, but if you’re a customer and not a cell phone vendor, it’s not your problem, you just have to wait in the store for a while. AT&T networks are shit, I can’t think of a single AT&T selling point without the IPhone.