A Modest Proposal (for Verizon and AT&T)

It’s a simple one, really: Spend a few zillion dollars less on attack ads and more on building out and resolving issues in your networks and with your handsets. That way the vast majority of the United States that uses one of the two services, AT&T and Verizon, top executives and their Madison Avenue pitchmen and women included, can endure fewer dropped calls and enjoy more actual coverage in more areas, not just on those colorful “coverage maps” in the TV spots but in real life. I’ve long contended the bespectacled field tester Verizon still features in some of its advertising, the one who keeps asking, “Can you hear me now,” is not really a tester at all but a Verizon customer. (Joking, VzW legal squad. Joking.) The bottom line for my good friends in the wireless world: Whichever mobile operator it is who actually, finally transcends the “best efforts” mobile service most of us receive now and delivers the industry’s Holy Grail – a level of mobile service that truly provides what can be called with a straight face a landline replacement – will lock up the vast majority of the U.S. mobile services market without having to run even one more nyah-nyah-they’re-worse-than-us ad.

Here’s the funny part: It might not even be one of the U.S. wireless Big Two that takes us to the promised land first. Sprint; T-Mobile; up-and-comers such as Clearwire and Cellular South; the various companies that compete as Cellular One; or even one of the Latin American operators such as Grupo Carso’s Claro, Telecom Italia Mobile, or one of the myriad of Telmex or Telefonica properties might show AT&T and Verizon the way.

The AT&T-Verizon clash reminds me of the long-running, overhyped “cola wars” between Coca-Cola and Pepsi, but for the most part those battling bottlers never fail to deliver the goods. When’s the last time you tipped up a cool, refreshing container of either one and got a “beverage outage” message?

Upon further review, maybe using mobile services in the United States today is like drinking out of a can when what we really need is a bottle or a glass: At least with a clear container you can see whether the service [beverage] is available before you try to use your mobile device [have a drink]. When is the last time your handset and that of the person on the other end both showed “full bars” right as your call dropped? Probably not long ago. Not that I am bitter.

OK, so let’s say the mobile advertising onslaught works on some level and you decide to switch from one of the mobile giants to the other, bringing your mobile number with you? Well, here’s hoping you and yours have an easier time trying to make it across the mobile divide than our household did a year ago.

Maybe the answer to this question of ad-fueled style vs. service delivery substance lies with a company like Keynote that provides handset- and location-specific Web and mobile testing to assess actual user experience with apps, ads and downloads, and yes, basic wireless connectivity and performance, at various locations around the globe. As it says on Keynote’s Web site, “Connected companies will know precisely how their sites, content, and applications will perform on actual browsers, networks and mobile devices long before their customers and business are impacted.” I’d love to be able to make Keynote’s service performance test results publicly available to everyone, not just to the service providers that are its main customers, because what Keynote does gets to the heart of the buying decision that faces every residential or corporate mobile purchaser: If I commit to this contract, what is the service going to be like? I don’t want to hear that it “covers 97 percent of all residents;” will it work specifically for me and/or my company?

Apparently I’m not the only one, because upstart Root Wireless now is offering (in Beta) a smartphone app that according to the company runs unnoticed in the background and takes regular snapshots of your actual experience so you can verify how your wireless network is performing in your neighborhood. Empowering users (and potentially consumer regulators, or attorneys representing corporate wireless users) with quantifiable data might drive a battering ram through the current system that couples legally-nebulous contract language around “all services not guaranteed in all locations at all times” with onerous termination fees. You have to love the vendor’s statement about how its Root Coverage product “eliminates the need to rely on subjective, self-reported carrier coverage and performance maps.”

According to Digital Domain’s Randall Stross, Root’s app currently has one notable blind spot in that non-Apple apps such as Root Coverage do not run on the iPhone. Since that is largely a limitation of AT&T-Apple policy, not technology, perhaps that is another “wall” we may see come down in our lifetimes.

Or maybe Sprint will offer answers by looking outward. In July 2009 it agreed to pay up to $5 billion over the next seven years to Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson, turning over day-to-day operations of its network to the Swedish telecom company as Sprint focuses on new products and customer retention. It is the first time one of the major U.S. carriers, infamous for exercising tight control over assets, has fully outsourced core network functions to a third-party vendor. Maybe Ericsson (er, Sprint) will lead the charge that guides U.S. mobile operators from best efforts to best practices.

Pour more money into delivering the service. Pour less (with apologies to Luke Wilson) into ads trying to convince everyone the other mobile telecom titan is worse than you are. It’s a crazy dream...

MarketPOWER LLC is a strategic consulting firm and best practices living laboratory of Jeff Cotrupe, whose expertise in marketing, product management and research has helped companies generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, M&A and investment capital. Cotrupe is a former practice leader at global research firm Gartner and director at ADC Telecommunications.