According to a new study from the Yankee Group, 73% of Apple iPhone users are very satisfied with AT&T’s service, a number well above the industry average satisfaction score (69) and AT&T’s score for all phones (68). So what explains this satisfaction given two years of complaints and AT&T’s customer satisfaction scores traditionally falling at the tail end of the spectrum? Researchers guess that users are so in love with the phone as an all-purpose device, they transfer some of this adoration over to AT&T via a “halo effect”:

“Consumers transfer the high gloss of their Apple iPhone experience to AT&T,” says Carl Howe, Yankee Group analyst and author of the study. “The iPhone creates a halo effect that rubs off.” In other words, iPhone customers’ praise for their network may be a result of the famous “reality distortion field” that surrounds Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) CEO Steve Jobs and his company’s products. But AT&T says its network really isn’t as bad as many people think. It’s a perception problem, not a service problem, in the company’s eyes.

Instead of acknowledging the problem and explaining again how they’re working on shortcomings (which they certainly are), AT&T has to insult peoples’ intelligence by suggesting the problems have been hallucinatory in nature. Being unprepared for wireless traffic surges AT&T consistently sees coming isn’t a “perception” problem, and it can’t be fixed by more PR.

One thing that’s also happening in terms of AT&T’s satisfaction rates in the Yankee study is the firm didn’t bother to study users by region. Many of the angry AT&T iPhone users tend to be in San Francisco and New York, where congestion wreaks havoc on AT&T’s network. Unlike say in Cleveland, where users have a completely different experience on the AT&T network (like the ability to make phone calls on major highways).

Link to the original article…

The article makes no mention of publicly available financial reports from broadband providers like Time Warner Cable that prove that at the same time their profits on broadband service are increasing, the company s costs to provide the service continue to decline, along with the dollar amounts they spend to maintain and expand that network to meet demand.

Dampier also notes how the Journal misidentifies Rep. Eric Massa (who is pushing for laws protecting consumers from over-charging) and omits the potential conflict of interest in ISPs pushing for high overages while at the same time crafting massive new Internet video empires. While the Journal does note that the average user consumes just 15 GB a month (that number is even less, according to a recent Cisco study) it omits just how low many of these proposed caps have been (Frontier thinks 5 GB a month is reasonable for an entire household).

The Journal also also helps the industry make caps sound more reasonable by measuring them in e-mails sent, an annoying and silly metric used by ISP marketing departments. Most importantly though, the Journal helps sell the idea that a shift from flat-rate pricing to the industry’s version of metered billing (not to be confused with pure per byte billing) is both necessary and inevitable. In reality, it’s neither, and the metered billing models we’ve seen proposed by carriers so far are little more than price hikes disguised as altruism and fairness.

It doesn’t inspire fresh confidence in the American press when a consumer covers the full scope of the metered billing discussion far better than the nation’s supposed top business paper and its corral of staff writers.

Link to the original article…