Cingular Sucks ! - But, who else is better?

Having been a NEXTEL user for over 2 years, I was excited to finally move over to Cingular. At least I could use the phone when I travel outside the country and the coverage would be better - I thought.

The former seems to be more of a reality than the latter. As this WSJ article states, Cingular Wireless seems to have the worst record in terms of dropped calls. The FCC has recorded 4.6 complaints regarding dropped calls out of every 100,000 Cingular customers. This compares with T-Mobile's 4.3, Sprint/NEXTEL's 3.6/2.3 and Verizon's 1.4. So I guess I am not the only one with this problem. According to Cingular:

"While we take each complaint very seriously and are always striving for improvement, the number of complaints represents an infinitesimally small portion of our customer base," Cingular spokesman Ritch Blasi said. He acknowledged that there could be some engineering problems during the process of combining the two systems that may cause worse coverage for some customers, but emphasized that the issue isn't widespread.

What these guys don't realize, or don't want to admit is that the number of people who have taken the effort to complain are only a fraction of the number of people who face the problem. For instance, I admit not to have called to make a complaint - .... partly out of fear that my call may get dropped and I'll need to call back........