Cell phone service providers: Who's on top?

Are you getting a new cell phone for the Holidays?  Can’t figure out which service provider to sign a contract with?  Maybe you have to renew your contract.. you might want to consider the following data before you make your move.

As a member of the Data Team at FortiusOne, I often catch myself regularly thinking about new ideas for blogs; anytime I come across something with a geographical reference, I immediately think to myself, “this will look pretty good in GeoCommons”.  This little nuance happened to me the other day when I picked up a Consumer Reports magazine.  I know, I know.. I admit, I am a bit of a product review junky, and always do tons of research before I make any kind of a purchase.  As I was reading I came across an article that I thought was pretty interesting and even better because it had that geographical reference I am always looking for: Cell-phone service by city.

One television commercial that’s really been bugging me is the back and forth ads that Verizon and AT&T are running with their coverage maps. I’ve searched high and low and have not been able to find those (if someone does, please post a link to this blog and I will personally upload it and make it look real nice in Maker).  When I came across this Cell-phone service by city article in Consumer Reports I was partially relieved because I can now show what customers actually think about their cell phone providers in the 26 biggest metropolitan areas in the U.S.

Below I have created a map for each of the following providers: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile.  The proportional symbols represent the customers score (0-100) for each provider based on their satisfaction, 100 being the best score.  The report used 54,332 responses and I think this a great way GeoCommons can be harnessed to understand customer satisfaction geographically. Check it out:

Click here to view the data set in Finder!

Click to view interactive maps in Maker! Verizon AT&T T-Mobile Sprint.

So it looks like Verizon definitely gets the best review, and it’s interesting that AT&T has the lowest consumer ratings when it seems that AT&T is by far one of the most popular cell phone service providers. I’m willing to bet Apple’s exclusive sales agreement with AT&T and the iphone is probably keeping them running.  So if you want the iphone your going to have to deal with crummy service compared to what you’d get with Verizon. If not, then lets hope Apple will talk to Verizon soon.