AT&T could see a large portion of its smartphone subscriber base jump ship for the Verizon iPhone next month, a study found on Thursday. Of those asked by ChangeWave, 15 percent of AT&T subscribers said in December they were likely to change carriers in the next three months. While not an indicator in itself, it mapped almost exactly to the 16 percent of customers who said at the time that they would switch if Verizon had the iPhone.
Among just iPhone owners, 26 percent were planning to leave AT&T. ChangeWave didn’t break down the results by region, but New York City, San Francisco and a few other major cities have often had near-unusable 3G from AT&T since the iPhone spiked 3G adoption in 2008.
The plans to drop AT&T jumped from a still high 10 percent in September. Among those likely to go, 42 percent blamed it on AT&T’s most frequently cited problems of poor reception and coverage, while another 27 pinned it on frequent dropped calls. Only 17 percent thought the cost was too high.
