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You Lie, Luke WilsonThe misleading new cell phone ads from AT&T and Verizon.

By Farhad ManjooPosted Monday, Dec. 7, 2009, at 5:21 PM ET

If you were choosing a cell-phone provider based on TV ads alone, you'd have to pick Verizon. During the last couple months, the company has pummeled AT&T with a series of clever commercials that highlight its larger 3G network coverage area—Verizon's coverage map of America is bathed in red, while AT&T's is mostly empty. AT&T's response has been pretty lame: a lawsuit (since dropped) claiming Verizon's ads are misleading, a press release that claims to "set the record straight" but that really just offers a lot of unrelated spin, and a series of counterattack ads in which a chubby Luke Wilson spouts the same unrelated spin. AT&T doesn't directly dispute the claim that Verizon offers 3G coverage in more places. Instead, the company says that it offers cell service of some kind in 97 percent of the country. AT&T also claims that in places where it offers 3G service, its network is faster than Verizon's—well, at least according to studies that AT&T itself commissioned.

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So which company's commercials should you believe? Neither. AT&T and Verizon don't provide any stats that matter when it comes to your day-to-day phone experience. The central problem is that each provider makes sweeping generalizations about localized phenomena. Cell coverage is like the weather in San Francisco—it varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, from hour to hour, and depends on a range of factors outside your control (like the materials from which your building is made). The other similarity between cell reception and the San Francisco weather: They pretty much always suck. That's the most annoying thing about the AT&T-Verizon ad war. Compared with cell networks in foreign countries, coverage in the United States is slower and more prone to error. Whichever company you go with, your service will never be flawless.

Indeed, if AT&T and Verizon really want to prove that they've got great coverage, they'd advertise a little-known provision of their contracts: 30-day cancellation policies. Anyone who signs up for a new cell plan should consider the contract provisional. The only way to know whether a given phone will work for you is to put it through a rigorous, personalized test—and if it stinks, take the phone back and try out a new network.

To see why these return policies are essential, let's examine the claims Verizon makes in its ads. Assume that it's true that Verizon offers 3G service in five times as many places as AT&T. How should that affect your buying decision? Well, it depends. If you live in North or South Dakota—where AT&T lacks 3G coverage—then Verizon's ads are indeed pertinent. You might also be wary of choosing AT&T if you often travel to underpopulated places like the Dakotas. But if you live and work in or near a big city and travel mostly to other big cities, then Verizon's ads don't tell you anything about how your phone will perform. As AT&T points out, its 3G network covers 75 percent of the population—so for most people, Verizon's critique is meaningless.

The same goes for AT&T's claim that it has the nation's fastest 3G network. The company says its assessment is based on tests by "leading third-party researchers" who downloaded files on all networks and found AT&T to be the "winner by a significant margin." But even if you believe these vague claims, they don't tell you anything about how your phone will work in your kitchen or office. Will AT&T guarantee that your iPhone will be able to surf the Web significantly faster than your wife can on her Verizon-powered Motorola Droid? No, it won't—because depending on where you are at any given moment, the Verizon phone could run circles around the AT&T phone. And, anyway, you may not care whether AT&T's broadband service is faster if your service fails in other ways—if 30 percent of your calls are dropped, for instance, which is rumored to be the average error rate of AT&T's service in New York City.

All of these localized factors make it extremely complicated to choose a phone that will work for you. Hence my advice: Try before you buy. Most cell plans lock you in to two-year contracts that are fortified with steep early-termination fees. (For the most advanced phones, Verizon's fee is $350, while AT&T's is $175.) But thanks to pressure by regulators in many states, all cell companies now offer a 30-day grace period in which you can cancel your service without paying the fee.

Take advantage of these provisions. As part of my job, I get to try many different phones on different cell networks, and I've seen a lot of variance in service quality. When I travel to Los Angeles, I get great service on my iPhone—but trying to stream Internet radio stations over AT&T's 3G network as I drive around San Francisco pretty much never works. I once lived in an apartment that had great voice coverage on Verizon's network, but when I moved to a new place, my phone no longer worked in my bedroom—and the best service I could find there was Sprint.

You wouldn't be able to find out about such defects from cell-company TV ads. Luke Wilson doesn't know whether your phone will conk out in your cubicle—only you can find out for sure. Remember, you're going to be stuck with this phone for two years. Choose wisely.

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Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter.

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.

COMMENTS

Service is so varied from place to place that try-it-yourself is probably the best answer. Second best is to ask people you work/live with/near what they think of their service. They work under the same constraints as you and can give you a pretty good idea of what you'll experience.

That said, for frequent US travelers (as I am) Verizon is by far the best. It's shocking the places you can get a good signal and take/make calls (my mother took a call in a remote area of one of the national parks - everyone around her was stunned she even had signal). I routinely have full bars and 3G where peers on AT&T are struggling to find service. It's not ubiquitous, but it's extremely common.

If you travel internationally, though, Verizon options are limited but do exist (you need a combined CDMA/GSM phone - I think they offer something like 3 of them). If you need data services internationally, you're probably better off with AT&T due to the compatible GSM networks (just be prepared for a horrifying roaming bill when you get home).

-- robarpoch
(To reply, click here)

I agree. I've used Verizon for a while now going on 4-5 years. I always have signal. I live in South Metro Atlanta and while AT+T has pretty decent 3G coverage where I moved which is a more rural area I always have Verizon coverage. AT+T is on 2G where I am and Verizon is 3G. And the fact remains that whenever I travel I seem to have decent signal. The only rub I've found is Rural South Georgia. Where At+T and Verizon both don't have great coverage.

I think as long as you are on either you are doing pretty well. At least you're not on T-Mobil or (gasp) Sprint.

-- IanMas515
(To reply, click here)

Farhad brings up the point that the US's cell-tower infrastructure isn't up to snuff by international standards. The general excuse tends to be that the US is so spread out but that clearly shouldn't apply to either San Fran or NYC, or any other densely populated area in the US. There are so many worthwhile mobile technological advances that are just out of reach due mainly to the limited coverage and bandwidth available in the US. Lack of competition can't be the reason, as the cell-phone industry is the most competitive as it has ever been in the US. Are foreign countries highly subsidizing their cell-tower infrastructure and if so, why aren't we? If we're going to blow all this stimulus money, why not build something useful that will benefit all of us?

-- FirstInLastOut
(To reply, click here)

I think the biggest reasons why the US has been so slow to adopt essentially universal cell phone coverage is the US is an incredibly large and heavily rural/suburban nation, which will always take longer to upgrade infrastructure.

Secondly, the US also has an extensive and high quality land line system that has been in place for a very long time -- This delayed adoption of cell phones and relegated them to novelty/luxury status, when they were essentially utilities in Europe.

In the late 90's, I can remember visiting family in Poland and Hungary and absolutely everyone I knew had a cell phone (I saw the same thing when I was doing consulting work). At the time, this seemed very odd to me because cell phones were definitely a luxury item in the US. I was told they were so common because land line phones were incredibly unreliable or simply non-existent; the logical and cheapest solution was getting a cell phone.

-- KB01
(To reply, click here)

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