Verizon Wireless’ churn rate is the lowest in the industry, for the tenth straight quarter, reports Verizon today. In fact, it’s under a single percent, which is incredible in a day and age where many will jump ship for better phones, services, or prices — regardless of the contract penalty. Not all do, though, and that begs the questions, how many will leave Verizon, as well as the other Cingular competing carriers, next month when Apple’s promised iPhone hits the street?

The buzz was high for the iPhone upon its appearance at Macworld Expo earlier this year and has kept its fire burning fairly well in the last five months. However, when reality hits all the kiddies whose parents are fronting the financing for the expensive phone, will that buzz remain (as the teen demographics make up the majority of future buyers)? Will it be only more intense when people get some play time on the phone? What will the out come be?

Part of me says that the technical advances of the phone itself will be strong enough to cause a great amount of buyers to leave their current carrier due to the hardware superiority of the iPhone. However, that may only be the ramp-up phase and when word gets out about how well or not well the phone performs, this may have the masses holding off from their purchase.

I think service is a big part of ones cellular experience. I have had Cingular all the way back to when it was little ‘ol Pac Bell PCS. While the GSM sound quality and feature set is great, it didn’t measure up to Germany’s use of it, where I had discovered GSM on a business trip in 1998. After giving Pac Bell/Cingular four years to improve its network, I gave up and moved on. I went to AT&T (when it was TDMA and non-Cingular), I went to T-Mobile (I really do love GSM), and I finally landed with Verizon. I’ve been here since and, yes, while the hardware isn’t as cool as the other providers, guess what? I get a signal nearly every where I go. The other providers didn’t do that. Further, and a bit ironically, while at Macworld Expo and reporting on the keynote live, the gentleman from MacNN next to me had Cingular’s EDGE on his Mac. He kept losing his connection and when he did have it, he verbally complained out loud how slow it was. Me? I cruised away on the Internet without any issues with my EV-DO (Rev 0). I thought it was funny that the iPhone would be using the very service that MacNN’s reporter qualified as “crappy” to me. Time will tell if this frustrating aspect of Cingular’s network will tarnish the iPhone image.

Since no one has really used the iPhone, we can not comment on its radio strength. How well will it hold a signal and allow for Cingular to continue its “least dropped calls” slogan, time will tell. Again, with my PDA phones, I rarely had a good consistent string of calls that would not either drop or just could not be connected due to no signal when I had Cingular (and T-Mobile.) With PDA based phones, they always seem to have that handyman complex: Jack of all trades, master of none. Has Apple over come this and will it be a great phone? If not, again, dropped calls and such will tarnish its image like the poor data connection from EDGE networks.

In the end, I think the major hurdle for the iPhone will be its steep price. Those already in contract with Cingular won’t be able to take advantage of the subsidized price unless Cingular bends the rules (which it just might.) After that jump, users will then consider all the other cons and it just may be enough to, in fact, help Verizon Wireless hit an 11th straight quarter of top customer satisfaction.

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