Winning for Our Customers
Our 2004 customer growth is an admirable achievement, but the rate at which U.S. Cellular keeps existing customers is the envy of our industry. We have one of the highest customer retention rates in the wireless business, with more than 98 percent of our customers remaining with us month to month. U.S. Cellular’s 1.7 percent all-in churn rate compares favorably to the industry average.



Consistently high call quality is critical to customer satisfaction. We invested more than $655 million in network improvements and expansion, including the construction of 840 new cell towers, bringing the number of U.S. Cellular towers to 4,856 nationwide.

As a result, our customers spend more time on our network, and less time roaming. In 2004, less than 8 percent of our customers’ minutes of use were on another carrier’s network.

During 2004, we completed the system-wide conversion of our network to Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) 1X technology ahead of schedule and below budget.

CDMA provides our customers the highest-quality, most reliable service in the industry, enabling us to introduce hundreds of new wireless data applications through our easyedge(SM) service. Among the most popular were downloadable ringtones and games, along with innovations such as Traffic MapTM, which provides real-time traffic speeds and travel times in several markets.

Data services generated $67 million in 2004 revenues, a three-fold increase over the previous year.