ATT on Wednesday upped the ante in its legal spat with Verizon, accusing it in an amended complaint of twisting facts in a trio of holiday ads to make ATT’s wireless network coverage look a lot worse than it is.
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ATT on Wednesday night asked the federal court in Atlanta to force Verizon to pull the ads immediately.
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Verizon spokesman Jim Gerace says it is holding firm: What we are saying doesn’t change.
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What Verizon has been saying is this: ATT’s advanced 3G wireless coverage is paltry in comparison with Verizon’s. Its ad campaign, launched in October, features side-by-side coverage maps. The ads, which sparked ATT’s initial lawsuit, say Verizon has five times more 3G coverage than ATT.
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ATT doesn’t dispute the accuracy of the maps, but it says they are misleading. It says white space in the maps, which denotes no 3G coverage, could be read to mean that ATT has no coverage at all in those areas. We are entering into the critical (holiday) quarter for the industry, when wireless carriers typically sell the most, says ATT spokesman Mark Siegel. If customers think they can’t make calls in the vast majority of the country … that could do us irreparable harm.
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In its own ads, ATT claims to have the nation’s fastest 3G network. But a relatively small percentage of its network — ATT won’t say how much — is 3G. Most is powered by slower 2.5G or Edge technology. ATT, however, says it reaches 75 percent of the population with 3G.
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ATT is the exclusive distributor of the Apple iPhone, and many of those customers have complained about network performance, especially slow downloads and dropped calls.
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The reality is that (ATT’s) network is not performing well in many markets, says Walter Piecyk, a Pali Research analyst. And the perception among consumers is even worse…