It seems like every other day JD Power and Associates come out with new survey results to a similar survey – this time around the study is in regards to call quality. Perhaps JD should use their Power elsewhere as it seems Verizon has this category locked up. Not only do people generally PERCEIVE Verizon as the carrier with the best quality, but VZW proves they deserve to be thought of so highly.

The survey looks at 7 key criteria when evaluating call quality of a carrier:

1. Dropped calls
2. Static/Interference
3. Failed Call Connection on First Try
4. Voice Distortion
5. Echoes
6. Laggy Voicemail Notification
7. Laggy TXT Notification

Performance is determined separately in 6 regions:

1. Northeast
2. Mid-Atlantic
3. Southeast
4. North Central
5. Southwest
6. West

A bit of good news for everyone is that carriers in genral of reduced the number of connectivity issues and dropped calls – bravo for that. And in even better news for Verizon customers the company ran away with four 1st place Regional victories, tying with T-Mobile in the West and feeling bad for the competition probably let US Cellular win the North Central region to be nice:

Verizon Wireless ranks highest in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast and Southwest regions in wireless call quality performance. Verizon performs particularly well with regard to limiting dropped calls, failed initial connections, and late or failed text and voice messages.

In a tie, Verizon Wireless, Alltel and T-Mobile rank highest in the West region. T-Mobile performs particularly well in reducing the number of problems with echoes and distortion, while Alltel performs particularly well in limiting the number of problems associated with late or failed messages.

The typical complaint about Verizon is that sure, they have tremendous service quality, but they don’t have a great device offering and they gimp their phones. Well with a Motorola Android Phone, Palm WebOS phones, Storm 2, Touch Pro 2, Omnia 2 and others on the way, Verizon seems to have nowhere to go but up. This holiday season is going to be a fun ride so hold on!