The misleading new cell phone ads from AT&T and Verizon

If you were choosing a cell-phone provider based on TV ads alone, you'd have to pick Verizon. During the last couple months, the company has pummeled AT&T with a series of clever commercials that highlight its larger 3G network coverage area—Verizon's coverage map of America is bathed in red, while AT&T's is mostly empty. AT&T's response has been pretty lame: a lawsuit (since dropped) claiming Verizon's ads are misleading, a press release that claims to "set the record straight" but that really just offers a lot of unrelated spin, and a series of counterattack ads in which a chubby Luke Wilson spouts the same unrelated spin. AT&T doesn't directly dispute the claim that Verizon offers 3G coverage in more places. Instead, the company says that it offers cell service of some kind in 97 percent of the country. AT&T also claims that in places where it offers 3G service, its network is faster than Verizon's—well, at least according to studies that AT&T itself commissioned. So which company's commercials should you believe? Neither.