Wireless Customers Prefer Solid Wireless Coverage Over a Good Price.

In the findings of a Gartner, Inc. survey released, wireless customers revealed the most important factors in their selection of wireless services. The 122 enterprise survey respondents, all of whom attended Gartner’s Wireless Conference in Chicago in March, ranked their reasons for selecting wireless service providers and their satisfaction levels with major wireless service providers.

Factors for selection of wireless services are ranked below with the percentage of respondents who ranked each factor as most important. (Note: Percentages total more than 100 percent because some respondents had multiple equal criteria.)

Complete regional or national coverage: 73.5 percent

Service pricing: 25.3 percent

International roaming and coverage: 8.2 percent

Wireless Internet and data services: 8.1 percent

Handset selection and price: 2.0 percent

Other: 15.4 percent

(The “other” category includes business integration, billing, ability to combine multiple data or voice services in a unified product offering, paging services and the corporate agreement.)

“Beyond anything else, geographic coverage remains the most important characteristic for mobile enterprise users,” said Phillip Redman, Gartner mobile wireless research director. “No matter what the price, if you are out of coverage or get a fast-busy signal too often, you are paying too much.”

The survey also ranked the satisfaction levels of enterprise users with their service providers. The satisfaction results on network quality gave strong marks to AT&T Wireless, with Cingular, Verizon and Sprint PCS vying very closely for second place.

The survey asked respondents to rate wireless network providers’ network quality as either poor, below average, average, good or excellent. The results showing providers receiving good or excellent satisfaction levels are:

AT&T Wireless: 57.1 percent

Cingular: 51.6 percent

Verizon: 51.2 percent

Sprint PCS: 50.1 percent

VoiceStream: 42.9 percent

Nextel: 40 percent

Others: 25 percent

“Plenty of opportunity exists for the right provider to gain that top spot,” said Redman. “Enterprises are expecting more from their wireless carrier, and next-generation wireless data services will be another proving ground.”

For more information at http://www.gartner.com