“Hello…Please may I help you?” is an attractive voice that I get to hear from the AT & T customer care wing when I call up with queries regarding my bills and usage statistics. Quite contented with the very impressive services provided by the company, I hardly bother to know what other guys in the industry are doing. But you might not be as lucky as I am, even with AT&T. This is when you might want to look for other providers and see what they have to offer. Leading financial website Billshrink has conducted a survey on the usage and cost statistics of mobile phone wireless service providers and came up a comparison which is quite useful in understanding the general trends of mobile phone usage behavior.
Billshrink has conducted study on five areas of wireless mobile phone services on five major giants of the industry namely AT& T, Sprint, T-mobile and Verizon:
Average monthly Fee:
Being a user of AT&T, I was surprised to know that the users of this service provider pay the second highest monthly fee touching almost $114 per month. But Verizon users pay more than us. For them it comes to more than $114 a month. T –mobile users come 3rd on the list by paying halfway between $110- 112. Sprint users come last on the list by paying a little over $110. If you are a user of Verizon better know that you are paying the highest. Coming to realize that I’m amongst the higher payers of monthly mobile fee, the voice from the customer service cell doesn’t appear to be so attractive anymore! …Well, I ‘m just joking. Well, I’m satisfied with the services. If you are a Verizon or an AT& T user and tempted to jump over to other providers such as T-Mobile or Sprint, don’t do so in haste. Maybe you’ll have to base your decision on a number of factors like the features offered and the customer service etc.
Average Minutes Used
When you compare the four major industry honchos on the number of minutes used by their users, you’ll be surprised to know that the trend is absolutely the reverse of what we’ve got to see in terms of monthly fee. Sprint tops the list with its subscribers spending almost 1100 minutes on an average! T-Mobile users come next with a little over 850 minutes on an average. AT &T comes third, being exactly on the 850 minute mark. Verizon comes last with a little below 850 minutes. So T-Mobile and Verizon are on either side of the 850 minute wall.
Well, the ranking in comparison to the monthly fee paid statistics might be surprising, but on closer scrutiny, you’ll come to know that this is not surprising at all. After all, commonsense says that one will naturally want to spend more time using services that charge less. If you are expensive, the lesser time your services are utilized. Who wants to spend huge money on mobile bills anyway?
Average Data Usage
The average data usage statistics interestingly don’t follow the inverse trends as seen in the case of average monthly fee and time usage statistics. Of course, here too Sprint tops the list with an average usage of about 58 Mb. followed by Verizon with a little below 50 Mb. AT & T’s data usage statistics are above 25 Mb. making the company the third highest data accessed company. Last on the list is T-mobile with a little below 15 Mb of data usage by its subscribers.
Average SMS Usage
If you are a T-Mobile user, you might have most probably topped the list of SMS usage in comparison to your contemporaries using the other services because T-Mobile stands first on the list with an average SMS usage of approximately 800. Sprint is the runner up with an average SMS usage of 700 followed by Verizon and AT& T competing with each other very closely with figures touching 500.
Mobile Phone Bills
Last, but not the least, an issue of prime concern is that of mobile phone bills and I’m sure you were waiting all this while to take a peep into this matter! Sorry to keep you waiting so long. Here are the results- Dallas tops the list with a monthly average of $117 followed by Philadelphia at $115 and Houston at $114. Last on the list are San Francisco and San Diego with a monthly average usage of $97 only.
A monthly phone bills based on the service provider could have given us a picture of which service providers are the
most expensive when it comes to billing.
After seeing this, you might want to switch over to another service provider or stay with your own. Read up a lot of reviews about the service providers and the services they offer. Also read a lot of customer reviews because that is where you’re going to get some reliable information about each of these service providers and then decide.
I would like to conclude by saying that your phone bills and usage satisfaction eventually depend on you. Whatever your service provider, if you use your mobile frugally, you’re going to be a happy customer. So before you think of changing lanes on your race track to mobile usage efficiency just try to rectify any snags that you have as a user regardless of your ser vice provider, because if you are extravagant, you’re going to get enormous bills even from the cheapest service provider.
