It’s no secret that cell phones sometimes drop calls. In fact, that is one of the top complaints we hear from cell phone consumers who email us here at www.hearusnow.org.

But even we were a bit surprised by a story making the rounds in recent days about an iPhone user in New York City who took his unit into the local Apple store because he was experiencing so many dropped calls.

Here’s what happened to consumer Manoj, as chronicled by the Engadget blog by way of our sister blog “The Consumerist.” For the uninitiated, Apple calls the tech people who work at their stores “Geniuses.”

“After a few tests, the Apple Genius determined that Manoj’s phone was dropping 22 percent of its calls, which turns out to actually be ‘excellent’ compared to most iPhone users in the New York area, where a dropped call rate of 30 percent is said to be average – according to the guy at the store, anyhow. The Genius further went on to confirm that the phone was indeed ‘fully functional,’ and that the problem is ‘consistent with the service provided by AT&T.’”

This illustrates a story we have been hearing from iPhone customers virtually since the iconic gadget was introduced a couple of years ago: I love my iPhone, but I can’t stand the service I get from AT&T, the exclusive wireless service provider the device.

At the core of all this is one of the most anti-consumer practices employed by the wireless industry, exclusivity deals that force people who want popular devices like the iPhone or the Palm Pre to get their service a certain provider. For the iPhone it’s AT&T. For the Pre it’s Sprint. And the story is the same for virtually all of the most popular models of wireless phones.

The situation is made all the worse for consumers by another widespread anti-competitive practice of the wireless carriers – luring customers into long term contracts with steep cancellation penalties called “early termination fees.”

Carriers say the penalties are necessary to make sure they recover device discounts offered to customers who sign on for the long term deals. That may be partially true, but the ETFs have traditionally been an all-or-nothing proposition. A customer in the last month of a two year contract had to pay the same $150-$200 ETF fee as a customer in the first month of such a contract.

Most of the big carriers have recently begun to pro-rate their ETFs, but only to a certain degree. They now typically knock off a few dollars a month as customers go through the term of their contracts. Logically, that should mean that a customer in the last month of a two year contract should owe little or nothing, but most still are hit with an ETF of $60 or more even then.

On a side note, we have gotten a flood of stories from consumers in recent days complaining about exclusivity agreements and related matters. We are going through them and hope to have most of them posted soon on the “Share Your Stories” section of the www.hearusnow.org web site.