Carrier Anyone considering switching to Sprint?

[Anthony T]

With T-Mobile, I pay $80 for the unlimited data, talk & text plan. My EIP is $30 a month. I have a business family discount of $20 a month, and my bill is still $100 a month FOR ONE LINE. Some family plans are cheaper, which I find ridiculous.

Sprint's new offer with their plans being 50% off seems like a great deal to me. $40 a month for unlimited data sounds amazing (plus the EIP though). I'm just concerned about Sprint's service. Have they improved at all? I live on Long Island and I'm not sure how they are around here.

 

[eyoungren]

With T-Mobile, I pay $80 for the unlimited data, talk & text plan. My EIP is $30 a month. I have a business family discount of $20 a month, and my bill is still $100 a month FOR ONE LINE. Some family plans are cheaper, which I find ridiculous.

Sprint's new offer with their plans being 50% off seems like a great deal to me. $40 a month for unlimited data sounds amazing (plus the EIP though). I'm just concerned about Sprint's service. Have they improved at all? I live on Long Island and I'm not sure how they are around here.

The last I heard Long Island wasn't good.

That was a while ago though so it may have improved. Check sensorly.com and rootmetrics.com. Also, opensignal.com may show coverage. Generally, the people at s4gru.com will also have knowledge to impart as well those on the Sprint reddit page.

Additionally, Marcelo Claure and his executive team are on Twitter and they can be tweeted directly.

Do NOT rely on Sprint's maps.

Just something to be aware of if you do take advantage of this offer. When it comes to customer service, Sprint is essentially three companies that do not know anything about each other.

What I mean by that is that online, telesales and in store all handle things very differently and they do not communicate at all with each other. So, pick one form of service that you are ok with seeing things through with and stick with it.

Do not for instance, call up telesales and then go to a store to finish up. Whatever telesales tells you the in store sales staff will assuredly deny or refuse to honor. This is just an example, but it shows that the three types do not mix.

I was with Sprint for 16 years and nothing they do surprises me. Just be prepared for decent customer service with sporadic awful service and the willingness to work around them and you will do ok.

 

[BlueGoldAce]

With T-Mobile, I pay $80 for the unlimited data, talk & text plan. My EIP is $30 a month. I have a business family discount of $20 a month, and my bill is still $100 a month FOR ONE LINE. Some family plans are cheaper, which I find ridiculous.

Sprint's new offer with their plans being 50% off seems like a great deal to me. $40 a month for unlimited data sounds amazing (plus the EIP though). I'm just concerned about Sprint's service. Have they improved at all? I live on Long Island and I'm not sure how they are around here.

I have T-Mobile and love it. I only pay $100 , unlimited everything, for two, though.

I have been with all four carriers and find T-Mobile, by far, to have the best deals and customer service.

I had sprint for a long time, and would almost rather go without a phone then go back to them.

 

[eyoungren]

I had sprint for a long time, and would almost rather go without a phone then go back to them.

This is why we left. We suffered slow data and bad coverage from late 2012 to September of this year when Sprint started dropping phone calls and making calls cut in and out. After several "Call Failures" my wife wanted to throw her $900+ iPhone 6s against the wall. So we left. Because staying would have been exactly that - going without a phone.

 

[Akack]

Nope, happy with my TMO coverage in my area and have heard nothing but bad news about Sprint's coverage even if pricing is less.

 

[avanpelt]

Nope. I've had every major carrier except T-Mobile and I would never go back to Sprint. If you're going to be paying half of what you're paying T-Mo, rest assured that you will almost certainly be getting half the coverage/speed, half the customer service, and double or triple the frustration.

There are edge cases where people love Sprint's cell service and customer service; but spend 15 or 20 minutes reading these forums and you'll find that those people are the exception as opposed to the rule.

 

[eyoungren]

Nope. I've had every major carrier except T-Mobile and I would never go back to Sprint. If you're going to be paying half of what you're paying T-Mo, rest assured that you will almost certainly be getting half the coverage/speed, half the customer service, and double or triple the frustration.

There are edge cases where people love Sprint's cell service and customer service; but spend 15 or 20 minutes reading these forums and you'll find that those people are the exception as opposed to the rule.

I have to disagree with this in general.

If Sprint had not started dropping our phone calls we would have stayed with them. Things have gotten much better where I live - it's just not enough in the places I work, live and play in.

But I'm only one person and there are many people who have decent speeds and coverage with Sprint in my market, especially on the east side.

So, I think it comes down to location.

I will grant you that the other carriers have more locations with better coverage than Sprint does, but that doesn't mean Sprint is all bad. And I know you covered yourself by saying there are edge cases as well as mentioning the issues several people have discovered here.

But some points about the last thing.

• How many people have asked lately about unlocking Sprint iPhones?
• How many people have asked lately about how to fix their coverage and speeds?
• How many have complained lately about Sprint?

And I define "lately" as in the last year. Sure, there's always a case here, but if you compare to how it was in 2012-2014 to now you'll find that there has been a dramatic dropoff on posts. You can argue if you like that it's because Sprint started unlocking phones and people just left and didn't bother to post here, but I think it's more than that. As a former Sprint customer I've handled a lot of these Sprint posts over the last three years or so. The amount of those posts have sharply decreased in the last year.

I'm not saying Sprint is wonderful and that everyone should be on Sprint (I'm not on Sprint myself) but I do think things have improved. Location is going to be a big factor in that now and no one can paint Sprint with the broad brush of "Sprint sucks" anymore.

 

[DcGamer05]

Connecticut here and I had Sprint for almost a year before jumping ship to Verizon. Excuse after excuse and fake dates about when they would be doing tower upgrades.

LTE never happened when I had them and 3G service was unusable not just speed test wise but any type of streaming like Spotify even at lowest quality just didn't work - ever. CS was sympathetic but they couldn't do anything. It was like having an Ippd touch that makes cellular calls sometimes. Sprint was a nightmare here in Connecticut.

My friend Angie still has them while they have upgraded to LTE and they claim it's a spark area she still never gets above 5mbps down and 1mbps she takes a bus to work and back she also has trouble streaming over LTE she says the music will sometimes stop or just not load. Sprint has a long way to go and remember in populated areas sprint is also boost mobile and those towers from sprint are just overloaded with tons of customers along with virgin mobile. Sprint just doesn't have the low band spectrum to handle what they are trying to do. Spark is great if it works but 2.5ghz is terrible for cellular and doesn't go very far. Their lower bands are severely limited.

 

[eyoungren]

Connecticut here and I had Sprint for almost a year before jumping ship to Verizon. Excuse after excuse and fake dates about when they would be doing tower upgrades.

LTE never happened when I had them and 3G service was unusable not just speed test wise but any type of streaming like Spotify even at lowest quality just didn't work - ever. CS was sympathetic but they couldn't do anything. It was like having an Ippd touch that makes cellular calls sometimes. Sprint was a nightmare here in Connecticut.

My friend Angie still has them while they have upgraded to LTE and they claim it's a spark area she still never gets above 5mbps down and 1mbps she takes a bus to work and back she also has trouble streaming over LTE she says the music will sometimes stop or just not load. Sprint has a long way to go and remember in populated areas sprint is also boost mobile and those towers from sprint are just overloaded with tons of customers along with virgin mobile. Sprint just doesn't have the low band spectrum to handle what they are trying to do. Spark is great if it works but 2.5ghz is terrible for cellular and doesn't go very far. Their lower bands are severely limited.

In a lot of areas what is happening is that public services are not vacating the 800mhz channel (Band 26). Sprint has had to sue Arizona Public Service (APS) for not vacating 800. The deadline for that was over a year ago. APS has been milking it because the FCC has said that Sprint has to pay for any new APS equipment and the vacating of the channel.

Sprint also made two mistakes that have cost them lots of time in the Network Vision rollout. One was no penalty contracts. Vendors just did the work whenever they got to it and since there were no penalties for blowing deadlines things got done whenever they got done. Two, Sprint went with "just in time" backhaul orders. In other words they only made orders for fibre backhaul when they needed it. The problem with that is that the other carriers ordered backhaul all at once and those vendors were busy filling backorders on that before they even got to Sprint's backhaul orders. Then you add in the actual backhaul vendors themselves (the cable/DSL companies) and their dragging their feet to lay fibre and hook the towers up

All the way around, execution was very poor and Sprint is now dealing with the fallout on that.

Sprint is trying to adjust with carrier aggregation and beamforming, but when one of the bands you need for the three band setup is not useable it's difficult.

 

[cnotes2019]

I just got sprint and have to say that in my area so far it's pretty darn good. I will agree that their customer service is subpar but so far my iPhone 6s is working great with lte speeds etc. I have service with all four major carriers and they are all good in my area. But I will be cautious about saying anything definitively about sprint until more time is spent with them.

 

[eyoungren]

I just got sprint and have to say that in my area so far it's pretty darn good. I will agree that their customer service is subpar but so far my iPhone 6s is working great with lte speeds etc. I have service with all four major carriers and they are all good in my area. But I will be cautious about saying anything definitively about sprint until more time is spent with them.

I switch to the iPhone in September 2012. I have to say that aside from the network issues having the iPhone made having Sprint a hell of a lot easier. For the last three years I have stepped foot into a Sprint store maybe three times total and only called them once! And none of that was about the phone itself.

Any issue I had with the phone I dealt with Apple on. Cutting Sprint customer service out of that entirely was one of the best things I've ever done.

 

[Applejuiced]

Hell to the no.
Switch to the worst carrier?
I'd rather get an Obama phone

 

[cnotes2019]

Hell to the no.
Switch to the worst carrier?
I'd rather get an Obama phone

Location location location

 

[skiltrip]

Never. I had Virgin Mobile (Sprint) a number of years ago and my wife is still on Sprint. Data speeds are pretty sad.

 

[eyoungren]

I'd rather get an Obama phone

Uhhh, yeah, about that Obama phone there AJ…

http://newsroom.sprint.com/news-releases/assurance-wireless-introduces-two-new-low-cost-offers.htm

Access Wireless provides nationwide coverage on the Sprint network.

https://www.accesswireless.com/

 

[brianjsw01]

Getting 40Mbps down and 4 up in Chicago suburbs but some towers are still either slow or flat out broken and you get "no network connection" errors even though phone says LTE. Have to toggle airplane mode and force a tower switch to restore it. When it does work it's great. Depends which tower you get. The other big three drop calls at my home so I don't have a choice but stay with Sprint.

 

[eyoungren]

Getting 40Mbps down and 4 up in Chicago suburbs but some towers are still either slow or flat out broken and you get "no network connection" errors even though phone says LTE. Have to toggle airplane mode and force a tower switch to restore it. When it does work it's great. Depends which tower you get. The other big three drop calls at my home so I don't have a choice but stay with Sprint.

That's the network equipment. Some of the older stuff has yet to be replaced on certain towers and that equipment does not hand off LTE from tower to tower. There's a writeup on s4gru.com on it if you are interested.

 

[Applejuiced]

Uhhh, yeah, about that Obama phone there AJ…

http://newsroom.sprint.com/news-releases/assurance-wireless-introduces-two-new-low-cost-offers.htm


https://www.accesswireless.com/

Lol
Damn it, is it Sprint?
Cheap Obama

 

[brianjsw01]

Thanks I'll check it out. It's pretty frustrating!

 

[eyoungren]

Thanks I'll check it out. It's pretty frustrating!

Here you go!
http://s4gru.com/index.php?/blog/1/...-due-to-circuit-switched-fallback-technology/

 

[DcGamer05]

I know the term obama phone has become extremely popular but the phone actually has nothing to do with president Obama. And it was President Bush who expanded low income telecommunications to cellular not Obama but subsidized or free telephone has been around for quite sometime before Bush and Obama


http://www.factcheck.org/2009/10/the-obama-phone/

And Sprint is still awful you'd be better off on prepaid cricket or straight talk at that point

 

[coney718]

With T-Mobile, I pay $80 for the unlimited data, talk & text plan. My EIP is $30 a month. I have a business family discount of $20 a month, and my bill is still $100 a month FOR ONE LINE. Some family plans are cheaper, which I find ridiculous.

Sprint's new offer with their plans being 50% off seems like a great deal to me. $40 a month for unlimited data sounds amazing (plus the EIP though). I'm just concerned about Sprint's service. Have they improved at all? I live on Long Island and I'm not sure how they are around here.

Sprints 50% offer doesn't included T-mobiles unlimited data plan. T-mobiles 10GB plan for $80 you can get for $40 on Sprint (Which is still a good deal). Sprint's unlimited plan is $70 plus EIP. I know because I was also considering this so I called the other day and asked some questions. If you can live with 10GB of data a month then the $40 plan is great deal if Sprint works well in your area.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Sprint (an MNVO) has been a great in between Verizon/AT&T and T-Mobile for me.

I want to love Tmo, but the rural coverage is just awful (which I occasionally need) and Sprint is remarkably good for me whatever reason.

The real story is that each needs to be tried to really know what is best for everyone.

 

[eyoungren]

Sprint (an MNVO)…

Just to be clear, Sprint is not an MVNO. They are a Tier 1 internet service provider.

Boost, Virgin Mobile, Ting and a handful of others would be MVNOs using Sprint's network.

MVNOs, by definition, do not have/provide their own network.

 

[willmtaylor]

Absolutely not. Their coverage is a total joke where I work & play.