Five Worst Cellphone Carriers

In honor of Evil Week, we're switching up the Hive Five a bit. Instead of picking the five best in a category, this week we're choosing the five worst, specifically, the five worst wireless phone carriers, based on your nominations. Some carriers are great, but these ones earned your ire because of lax customer service, high prices, terrible contracts, and more. We're going to look at each of them, and offer some tips to get better service if we can.

Earlier in the week we asked you to let us know which cellphone carriers you thought were the worst overall. You definitely rallied to the cause and offered up plenty of nominations, complete with stories to back them up. Here's what you said, in no particular order:

The polls are closed and the votes are counted! To see which of the major carriers you disliked the most, head over to our weekly Hive Five followup post to check out the winner!

Verizon Wireless

Five Worst Cellphone Carriers

It should surprise no one that the largest US wireless carrier (by number of subscribers) would also be one of the least liked. When you're that large, it comes with the territory—but Verizon Wireless doesn't do itself any favors. Many of you called them out for dropped calls and poor reception. The brownie points they earn thanks to their network they quickly lose when it comes to sloppy, stonewalling customer service that will smile, apologize for your frustration, and still charge you overage fees and impressively high wireless plan prices. Many of you praised Verizon's coverage, others decried it, but there was one thing you were all unanimous about: Their stranglehold on available handsets, slow smartphone updates, resistance to carrying new phones (just look at the Nexus 5—available on all carriers except Verizon Wireless) and keeping their customers on old devices, and their absolute refusal to sell devices free of crapware all make your relationship with them love/hate at best.

We can't help you if you're looking for Verizon Wireless to improve its coverage or service, or if you'd like them to carry more up-to-date devices (trust us, we'd like that too), but if you do run into issues with their customer service, we can help. First, consider pinging them on Twitter under @vzwsupport. I've had good success personally with them, and when they failed (and boy did they fail) I took it up a notch and contacted my regional president for customer service. It's the nuclear option and should only be used if you're not getting anywhere through normal channels, but it worked like a charm. I had an issue I had been trying to get resolved for a week resolved in 30 minutes.


Five Worst Cellphone Carriers

AT&T is the nation's second largest wireless carrier, and even though they're pretty well known for getting their hands on hot new handsets first and offering them to the public, they still earned your ire for more reasons than we have room to list. Among some of your most common complaints were dropped calls, terrible reception, dead zones, terrible rate plans, and ridiculously high prices, especially for fees and upgrades or changes. Many of you had specific ire for AT&T's customer service, which many of you said varied so much from person to person depending on who you got, one person would assure you that they were capable of making a change you needed, only to be completely stonewalled by the next person you spoke to, who told you what you wanted was impossible. What's most interesting is that more of you had specific anecdotes to share about your bad experiences with AT&T than any other carrier.

Again, if AT&T's prices are out of the park, or their plans just don't work for you, there isn't too much we can do to help. However, if you need customer service and their toll-free number just isn't cutting it, consider reaching out to @ATTCustomerCare on Twitter to see if they can lend a helping hand, or head over here for executive contact information if all else fails and no one is willing to help you. They're a massive company, but persistence is key to finding someone willing to lend you a hand.


Five Worst Cellphone Carriers

Sprint is half the size of its next largest competitor, but that didn't stop a number of you from having significant complaints about the company, its service, and the way it treats its customers. However, your all-but universal issue was service. Terrible reception, spotty coverage depending on the part of the country you live in, dead zones and roaming fees when you wandered into them, dropped calls, and missed text messages were all your primary complaints. While some of you even praised Sprint's customer service for being active listeners and understanding when it came to problems, the real issue with Sprint is infrastructure. Great phones and smiling customer support are only so good until you can't actually use your phone.

On the bright side, @SprintCare is pretty responsive on Twitter, and Sprint's coverage map is pretty up to date as well. They don't have a lot of differentiation in whether your service in a covered area is any good, just whether it's available, but PCMag's wireless network survey crossed the country to tell you who has the best service in what parts of the country. At least then you'll know what you're getting into. Plus, Sprint may be tempting with its unlimited plans, but remember, there's always more than meets the eye. Still, if you really need to get a hold of someone at Spting, they set up a customer service hotline for Consumerist readers back in 2007, and to my knowledge, it still works well. Just be kind and courteous when you call, and don't ruin it for everyone.


Five Worst Cellphone Carriers

T-Mobile is the smallest of the major US carriers, and as such most of your concerns about them revolve again around coverage, availability, dropped calls, no data, and other infrastructure-related issues. However, there's another dimension to T-Mobile's issues. While Sprint seemed to—in your responses—be at least courteous and above board about their issues, T-Mobile apparently doesn't have the resources for stellar customer service or infrastructure investment. Many of you called out T-Mobile for advertising prices on plans and devices that they refuse to honor when it comes time to buy, aggressively marketing itself in areas where they have no coverage (thus encouraging people to sign up and pay for phones they can't use), and forcing people out of grandfathered contracts and raising plan prices as a result. One of you even called them out for the way they pressured the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to water down what 4G really means so HSPA+ could qualify (and, by proxy, all of the carriers could say they have 4G when in reality it's little more than marketing lingo.

If your issues with T-Mobile are infrastructure related, there's nothing to do really but jump ship—just make sure they don't charge you early termination fees even though you don't have coverage or service. They've been known to, even to people outside their coverage area and even peace corps volunteers serving overseas. It's also worth noting that their new approach to being the "un-carrier" and doing away with contracts is definitely a step in the right direction, but it's not totally what it looks like. If you need to cut through T-Mobile's support, try them @TMobileHelp on Twitter, or go here for executive contact information (although it's defiitely outdated and lists the old CEO of the company—some of it should get you to the right place if you need to escalate though.) Beyond that though, if you're willing to find an executive's email address and escalate with the good old Executive Email Carpet Bomb, as our friends at Consumerist call it, you'll have good luck.

US Cellular

Five Worst Cellphone Carriers

US Cellular is actually the fifth largest wireless carrier in the US. A couple of you saved some ire for little old US Cellular, complaining that for a company that wants to play with the big carriers, it still seems to do customer service like a small company—that is, poorly. US Cellular actually has quite a reputation for stellar customer service, so it was surprising to hear complaints about them, but those of you who did complain noted poorly trained reps and confusing tactics, especially around their "belief" plans, which look great from the outside but quickly turn sour after you sign up. However, US Cellular's biggest issue is the one that comes with being smaller than the other carriers: coverage. Reception is spotty, mobile data is in-and-out, and the company's 4G rollout is going a bit slower than expected, and even in areas where you have coverage, it could drop on you randomly. The company had a pretty rough quarter too, shedding subscribers en masse, no thanks in part to a massive billing problem that soured a lot of customers.

US Cellular's customer service team is reportedly very responsive, especially on Twitter, where they're available as @USCellularCares. The company's executive team has shuffled quite a bit since all of the resources we could find, so your best bet if you need to escalate is to use their executivte leadership team page to determine an email address and reach out.

Predictable, but those are your picks! Now it's time to put them to a vote to get to who's really just the worst:

No honorable mentions this week, because frankly we've covered the major players here entirely. Still, just because the major US carriers have a terrible relationship with their customer bases doesn't mean the same is true across the board. We'll flip this around a bit next week, and approach this topic again from our usual angle, but in the meantime, if you have a good or a bad story about your carrier, wherever you live, leave it for us in the discussions below!



Photos by Senor Codo, Anthony92931, Jim Carroll, William Ross, Mtaylor848, and Kevin.