The Verizon iPhone just went on sale and AT&T is already scared of the competition. Here's a glimpse at the traffic on Chitika's ad network, currently at 4.1% Verizon vs AT&T's 95.9%. AT&T has made a couple of offers as a bid to keep current customers: day one of Verizon iPhone sales saw this offer from AT&T for 1,000 free minutes, and yesterday brought double the data for AT&T tethering customers.
AT&T says it's a "thank you" for being such great customers. I think it shows just how much they've been ripping us off.
We had two AT&T iPhones back in the US and never had too many issues with them. Call quality was good and we didn't have the dropped calls that those in bigger cities complain about. 3G data speeds were glacial in the corn fields of O'Fallon but pretty fast in St. Louis. Would I buy a Verizon iPhone? Not now, when the new 5G or refreshed 4G (4Gs?) iPhone is just around the corner.
When we move back to the US I'll certainly consider Verizon's iPhone. The bigger question is what this will do to AT&T's share of the iPhone pie long-term, and if the customers will see better network quality and lower prices in the future.