I was watching a commercial about AT&T phone service and they said something along this line
“It’s reliable. Even when the power is out. Thats why every 11 seconds someone switches back to AT&T after trying cable phone lines”
I call bullshit on this. Simply because that would mean nearly 55,000 people a week are switching back to AT&T.
Any idea if I’m wrong here or if they are just trying to pull a fast one?
What’s unreasonable about it? It’s a big company.
55,000 people a week may only represent 10,000 households. That is not an unreasonable number for whichever time period they are reporting.
It also occurs to me that they might be using an eight hour business day, not a 24 hour real day.
If they are, they’re really stretching the language (not that advertising hasn’t done this before). I mean, the quote is “every 11 seconds.” Not too many ways to parse that.
The ad doesn’t say how many people are switching from ATT. There are probably a whole bunch of people out there who switch back and forth, depending on who’s offering the best deal at the moment.
Good point. Service providers of all sorts - phone, cable TV, ISPs, etc. - have a semi-constant number of people signing up and a semi-constant number switching to other companies at any given time known as “churn.”
It’s entirely likely that somebody leaves AT&T every 11 seconds, keeping the net number of customers unchanged.
The funny thing is that customer acquisition costs (credit checks, line provisioning, sending out installers, etc.) are significantly higher than customer retention costs, but they’ll still brag that 55,000 new people signed up, even if 65,000 people switched to Working Assets or Verizon.
I note that they say “switches back”. If we assume a reasonably steady state, or even a modest but consistent flow in one direction to/from AT&T, then it’s an excellent bet that they are losing customers even faster: you can’t regain something you never lost, but I doubt they regain 100%
I can also imagine many situations that might cause a sudden deluge but sustained (a few months) deluge of transfers to AT&T: special AT&T promotions or a marketing push, recent rate increases by competitors, a buyout of a (regional) service, changes in the subscriber base due to corporate contracts on the carrier/provider level, etc.
It’s also a sad fact that “that’s why…” is a common dodge that is almost never investigated. Apparently the FCC considers causality a mystical notion that’s up there with faeries and magic audio cables in the “who knows?” department. I seee LOTS of ads attributing causality in ways that are probably unsupportable (or outright disprovable): Does “Performance: that’s why a million truck buyers bought our trucks last year” truly mean that reliability, 0% financing, corporate fleet contracts and the “Vegas Vacation with a Hooker” promotion accounted for less than 50,000 of the 1,050,00 trucks they sold last year? And if six months later (or in another market) they attribute their million-plus annual sales to reliability, innovation or styling, will the FCC come down on them?
Does anyone still use phones that’ll work with the power out? I don’t think I’ve had one in the past five years- every phone I’ve owned for quite a while now requires a powercord in addition to the wall connection.
None of our phones need power other than what is provided on the phone line. But then, by purposeful intent, (I collect old phones - might as well use them!) more than half of our phones are rotary dial.
The convenience of wandering around the house hasn’t outweighed the inconveniences of poor reception and having to wander the house trying to find where someone left the phone.
Well, until we got completely rid of our land lines two years ago, we had two non-cordless phones in the house which worked off the telephone lines. My SO’s phone is a standard phone, as well. While most people are using cordless phones these days (or phones with answering machines), I can think of a lot who still have normal phones that don’t require a power connection, as well.
I saw the same ad on a billboard on my last trip back to Michigan. Uh, they’re worried about VOIP? What about cellphones; they don’t use any household power at all, unless you don’t have a charged battery. I think there’s more cellphone pentration than VOIP penetration. Heck, even low-cost VOIP doesn’t seem compelling versus the cost of a cellphone.
I wonder why anyone at all in the world has VOIP or a land line. 
I’ve got 3 of them.
Couldn’t find a wireless phone that I could actually hear the person with whom I was trying to have a conversation.
We keep traditional, line-powered phones for emergency purposes - particularly in the basement room we use for a storm shelter. And our cordless phones have backup batteries in the base station. Also, many (but not all) newer wired phones use the power cord to power the additional features such as speed dial and ringer, but will still talk and dial on the line voltage in a power outage.
When there’s a fairly wide power failure, your cell phone may light up and attempt to call, but the cell towers run on electricity, too, so they’ll be down.
Seems to me that AT&T are using the British Telecom campaign that has been running for the best part of two years now, so basically they are paying their advertising agency a whole lot of cash for someone elses idea.
Stating that customers are coming back to you does not strike me as a very celever way to promote yourself, as it implies that those people were unhappy and left, and given a chance they will leave again, and the fact that of those that left, they cetairnly will not get them all back, and it also means that one person left every 11 seconds.
Count me as another person whose telephone works even when the local power is out. Of course, when the Phone Company’s central generator runs out of gas or breaks down (if your entire region is powerless), you don’t get phone service regardless.
I have two phones. One’s remote and won’t work when the power’s out, and one is wired in. I get power outages pretty frequently (once a month, I’d say, but usually not for very long). I call the power company on the land line. I have a cell, but it’s prepaid, and I don’t want to burn 10 minutes listening to “The Girl From Ipanema.”
I make it a point to always have a phone that runs on their power. We have too many black-outs around here to have to rely on powercorded phones.
This is just a good idea generally; if you have dedicated line service, I strongly recommend you spend $5-$10 (hell, I bought mine at a flea market for $1), pick up a cheap handset and just put it in the drawer where you keep your candles/flashlights for blackouts. Unless of course you already have phones that don’t depend on AC to work.
If you have a Cable modem providing telephone service, some companies (Comcast) provide a 4-8hr. backup battery standard, others (Time-Warner) provide it only if you ask for it. For VoIP (Vonage), you’ll need your own uninterruptible power supply.
Regarding celphones, I know for a fact Verizon has battery back-up at its base stations that are supposed to last at least 24 hrs., though in an emergency (think Katrina) you have to believe getting a channel will be difficult. Text messaging–since it doesn’t have to be “live”, has a better chance of getting thru (as many “American Idol” voters already know).