NEW YORK – Dec. 4, 2012 – Real estate professionals rely on their smartphones for business, and a reliable cellular carrier is critical. So which one ranks on top?

Consumer Reports recently released its annual cellular service report, based on a survey of more than 63,000 subscribers across 23 metro areas.

The top-ranking major carrier: Verizon Wireless. It scored high on voice and data quality, staff knowledge, and issue resolution. However, Consumer Reports also found that the carrier rankings varied a bit when broken down by city.

Of the other three major U.S. telecoms, the rankings were as follows after Verizon: Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T. AT&T scores the worst among the major telecoms in call quality, value and customer service, according to the Consumer Reports survey.

While Verizon ranked highest among the major carriers, Verizon’s LTE service ranked worse than AT&T’s. Verizon’s LTE networks cover double the area that AT&T’s does, and participants in the survey had more complaints about Verizon’s LTE service than AT&T.

Verizon ranked the best among the major carriers on the survey, but it was ranked fourth overall on the Consumer Reports cellular carrier list. The highest-ranked carrier was Consumer Cellular, a mobile virtual network operator that carries contract-free plans and relies on the AT&T network. US Cellular was second, followed by Credo Mobile (which uses the Sprint network).

Source: Consumer Reports

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