I’ve been keeping up with this thread for a while and decided to chime in with my experiences with Sprint. I was a Sprint customer from 2010-2012, but left in November of 2012 to join a family plan on Tmobile which worked out to be a better deal for me.
I’ve been test driving the network for the past week to see if Sprint has improved any since I left and the results have been mixed. While it definitely has shown signs of progression, there still seems to be room for improvement. I average around 3.3 megs down and 1.6 megs up. Ping times were consistently low which was definitely a good thing. I did manage to get some nice peak speeds, but these speeds were only obtained during early morning hours. I went to the same locations later on in the day and the speeds had dropped to 2-4 megs. I think its also worth noting that I have access to the sponsor maps on the S4gru site, so I did the majority of these tests as close as possible to the towers that I knew were upgraded. Even so, you’ll see that they still leave much to be desired.
I also noticed that I would drop down to 3g quite a bit. It seems like during the day the towers would get “crowded”, because I noticed that later on in the evening and late at night LTE would reappear in those same locations. I would say that I would see LTE about 65% of the time and 3g the other 35%.
I live in San Antonio and according to the info on s4gru my market is 96-96% complete. Spark is also launched in my city, however my device was not capable so unfortunately I did not get to test that.
Seeing that LTE launched here almost 2 years ago, I’m a little disappointed to say the least. Considering the fact that most (if not all) of the sites in my area should be upgraded, I would have expected more consistency at least in regards to maintaining a constant LTE signal. Speeds did manage to stay consistent for the most part, fast in the early morning and would slow considerably as the day progressed. Ping times were very consistent. I think with the addition of Spark the service will improve as a whole, but I feel for the customers who don’t have access to a Spark capable device.
I really would like to see Sprint do well, I believe that competition is good for everyone. I’m interested to see how they improve in the coming months. I know they’ve had some trouble with Network Vision deployment, but hopefully they’ll be able to shake those demons soon.
I attached a few of the results from my testing. Keep in mind that most if not all were done as close to the towers as possible. I wouldn’t bother testing if I had anything less than 4 “dots” of signal. I also attached the results that I got from my tmobile line in the same exact spot and time. The tests were done with an iphone 5c and an iphone 5 respectively.
Yeah, this is the problem I'm starting to have with Sprint.
First they tell you it's coming. Then they tell you it will get better. Then, after that they tell you that something even better is coming while not having what was promised finished.
It's the same old story with Sprint. They did this with Forsee and it never changed with Hesse. Promise, underdeliver and then promise something better. The people at s4gru are always on about how it will get better, Sprint is doing the work, don't whine. Whining gets you banned. But they habitually fail to recognize Sprint's standard MO.
Sprint has always operated this way and unless Masayoshi Son replaces damn near everyone, Sprint will continue to function this way. Just like the Arizona Cardinals Sprint always finds a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Sure, it's good in a few places, but having LTE just so I can reach the 3G speeds I should have already is not for me a good return on my monthly investment.
I've given Sprint two years to get LTE together. The other two carriers had it before Sprint even got to Phoenix and T-Mobile has come, built and gone with 4G here too. Sprint is still building it!
So, again, come September, unless things have changed I will be out. Past that point I refuse to continue paying Sprint to use my own WiFi.
