Inside a building downtown in a major metropolitan area, 4/5 bars: 336ms ping, 514Kbps down, 10Kbps up.
Why is my upstream never higher than 13Kbps?
Why is my upstream never higher than 13Kbps?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Sprint Denies Widespread Issues with Slow iPhone Data Speeds
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Sprint, Not so fast
My two cents on the matter. I just dropped Sprint on 10/17 but nothing to do with iPhone speeds but for two reason one of which is speed related & $10.00 premium. Sprint was my wife and daughter's account with 2 EVO 4G's. 85% of our cancel reason was CS related, local repair center related issue on wife's EVO phone. The 15% reason is speed (wife and daughter could care less) and being in a 4G network (Philly) we never got speeds near what I was getting on my Verizon Droid X 3G. Many posts are correct about towers (1.1 mile from house, 1 mile from wife's office) and where you are. Same on all networks. However I learned prior to cancel and verified on wife's data usage one main reason for slow speeds (Location, location) is amount of time your Sprint Phone, any Sprint phone is roaming on towers. Check it out with you data usage. Breaks it down. Like, 4G, 3G, 3G roaming, Roaming other. My wife's phone had 60% in roam data use between 3G and other. No wonder why my Droid X keeps beating it. Next, i am lucky and received 25% off on Sprint and I get 22% off Verizon. Doing apples to apples after features, taxes and fee's, I pay Verizon about $4.68 more per month than Sprint.
I want Sprint to be successful and keep AT&T/Verizon honest but many here are correct, it is just a matter of when not if on either caps or throttle back happening. (look at teh stock price, under $3.00) Also, Sprint is creeping in fee's, back end changes like all the others to shore up their costs. In the end, their poor customer service and local poor support cost them a good paying customer. Happy they have iPhone to boost their customer base but at times, they still have poorly trained employee's, poor CS phone associates, and managers who do not grasp mission of customer service. Not that other carriers do not have similar issues. IMHO.
My two cents on the matter. I just dropped Sprint on 10/17 but nothing to do with iPhone speeds but for two reason one of which is speed related & $10.00 premium. Sprint was my wife and daughter's account with 2 EVO 4G's. 85% of our cancel reason was CS related, local repair center related issue on wife's EVO phone. The 15% reason is speed (wife and daughter could care less) and being in a 4G network (Philly) we never got speeds near what I was getting on my Verizon Droid X 3G. Many posts are correct about towers (1.1 mile from house, 1 mile from wife's office) and where you are. Same on all networks. However I learned prior to cancel and verified on wife's data usage one main reason for slow speeds (Location, location) is amount of time your Sprint Phone, any Sprint phone is roaming on towers. Check it out with you data usage. Breaks it down. Like, 4G, 3G, 3G roaming, Roaming other. My wife's phone had 60% in roam data use between 3G and other. No wonder why my Droid X keeps beating it. Next, i am lucky and received 25% off on Sprint and I get 22% off Verizon. Doing apples to apples after features, taxes and fee's, I pay Verizon about $4.68 more per month than Sprint.
I want Sprint to be successful and keep AT&T/Verizon honest but many here are correct, it is just a matter of when not if on either caps or throttle back happening. (look at teh stock price, under $3.00) Also, Sprint is creeping in fee's, back end changes like all the others to shore up their costs. In the end, their poor customer service and local poor support cost them a good paying customer. Happy they have iPhone to boost their customer base but at times, they still have poorly trained employee's, poor CS phone associates, and managers who do not grasp mission of customer service. Not that other carriers do not have similar issues. IMHO.
Actually most people I've talked to feel that Sprint has improved their customer service in recent years. That seems to be the consensus.
Having tried the big four (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, & Sprint) I found Sprint to have the best combination of speed and price. AT&T was among the most expensive but had far too many dropped or distorted phone calls and suffered from seemingly random outages. Verizon had good voice reliability but data was somewhat lackluster and the cost was higher than I felt was warranted. T-Mobile had the best price and voice calls were much more reliable than AT&T but data speed was a little slower than I preferred. Sprint had a base price that was a little higher than T-Mobile but with much faster data speeds on their Wi-Max network. Some folks say the Sprint Wi-Max network isn't that great. All I know is that it was the fastest mobile network I've ever used thus far. Sprint's Wi-Max was more than fast enough to use as my home internet and with no data caps I didn't have to bother self-throttling my data usage. The only problem with using an iPhone on Sprint is that it doesn't support Wi-Max. That's why I'm sticking with my Evo 4G for now. Hopefully Sprint can figure out what's going on and address it sufficiently and won't have to resort to data caps in the process.
Last edited:
Currently getting 755 and 59/kbps in KC, MO on an HTC EVO. If I can ever get my hands on a Sprint 4S I'd post those speeds, but I haven't notice any decline in speeds since the launch.
I live 19 miles away from you and get 2.86 up and 1.39 down on 3g
The numbers you reported are pathetic, (I can run faster than that - lol)
(maybe those are edge numbers and not 3g?)
Either are you are master of Sarcasm, or "Sprint" has lowered the bar so far that....
Nope that's with 3 bars of 3G. and that's even if the speedtest.net app even loads. usually it just times out.
I want Sprint to be successful and keep AT&T/Verizon honest but many here are correct, it is just a matter of when not if on either caps or throttle back happening. (look at teh stock price, under $3.00) Also, Sprint is creeping in fee's, back end changes like all the others to shore up their costs. In the end, their poor customer service and local poor support cost them a good paying customer. Happy they have iPhone to boost their customer base but at times, they still have poorly trained employee's, poor CS phone associates, and managers who do not grasp mission of customer service. Not that other carriers do not have similar issues. IMHO.
I feel the same way. My local Sprint store treat customers like garbage. I have been drifting from Sprint for a while and for some reason decided to keep them for the iPhone 4S.
You people that are getting anything over 100kbps are lucky folks. Denver seems like a good area to be in for Sprint but everywhere else seems to blow.
For a 20 mile area between where I live and work, the speeds do not fluctuate too much. I was able to get almost 0.90 mbps this morning around 1:30am but that's not when I want to use data... My previous phone on Sprint was the Motorola Photon 4G in which I was able to consistently pull in data tests of around 1.5 mbps down and around 0.50 mbps up with 4G switched off btw.
Luckily I bought mine from Apple outright and should be able to walk into AT&T and have them take over service. I know there is a 2gb cap there under regular data but seriously people... If the data can't even make it to your phone then what the heck is the point of unlimited. I'd rather risk busting the cap and paying an extra 10 bucks for a gig knowing that I'm going to be able to use Siri when I need to or download an app on the go. Both of which have been a miracle under Sprint since Friday.
Edit: I forgot to mention I called Sprint earlier today and after going through Network resets (with no joy) was forwarded to a manager to whom I asked is this the type of speed I can expect for the life of this iPhone and his reply was "yes sir". I'm a reasonable cat, but this comment is what threw me over the fence.
Last edited:
I would agree since I had a good experience with CS in the past. In this case, this was over a two day period (iPhone launch period) and dealt with two asst. managers at service store, two online managers, and tried several different times to call in to CS. Again it was iPhone launch time 10/15-10/16. It was an EVO 4G "Know" issue and admitted issues by Sprint on charging port on wife's phone. In this case i was looking for a repair/fix and all I got was you need a new $500.00 phone since you can't get upgrade price for another 90 days. I did not even want another phone, nor an iPhone just a fix to her charging port because the phone worked fine, she liked it, could care less on data speed, (that is me not happy since I pay for it) but can't now charge the phone and needs to communicate with daughter before and after school.
But you are correct and are others, they had improvement. It was an 11 minute hold time just to get to cancel service on 10/16! That is how busy they were with iPhone. Ironically in the end, my ETF was under $200.00 for two lines and my wife was able to get Droid bionic for one cent from Amazon, and my daughter who did not like iPhone's (loved 4" + EVO screen) got a $99.00 8GB iPhone 4 from Apple store. Now that was an excellent experience from sale to activation. Surprised me. Entire transaction completed in 5 minutes on the associates iPod touch including scanning of my credit card, and my signature. So, in the end everyone in the house appears to be happy and my ETF cost from Sprint is helped by Droid bionic for one cent. once EVO charging port is fixed, it will go to eBay as will the other EVO and I should have come out on positive cash side after selling the EVO's
Sorry Sprint
There is no comparison:
Sprint=CDMA, theoretical 3 mbs (and no data/voice multitasking)
Verizon=Same as Sprint
AT&T=HSPA+, theoretical 14.4 mbs (with multitasking)
Yes, I know, proximity and local conditions can impact your experience.
There is no comparison:
Sprint=CDMA, theoretical 3 mbs (and no data/voice multitasking)
Verizon=Same as Sprint
AT&T=HSPA+, theoretical 14.4 mbs (with multitasking)
Yes, I know, proximity and local conditions can impact your experience.
Acronym meanings change with corporate whim. Sprint was established by Southern Pacific railroad in the 70's and SPRINT stood for "Southern Pacific Railroad Intelligent Network of Telecommunications".
Sprint shouldn't sell high end smartphones until they fix their network -
All their customers that just got the iphone 4 and 4s have no clue what a nice phone it is for browsing the internet quickly.
When talking about internet speeds, ripped off is what comes to mind
All their customers that just got the iphone 4 and 4s have no clue what a nice phone it is for browsing the internet quickly.
When talking about internet speeds, ripped off is what comes to mind
Went back to AT&T
I was getting horrible speeds on Sprint's 3G network (sub-100 kbps in a metro area), so I called AT&T to see if they would let me come back.
To my surprise, they reactivated my account, reversing the early-termination fee and letting me keep my grandfathered unlimited data and $10 text messaging plans. And I wasn't required to start another 2 year contract; I picked up right where I left off.
The number I was given for the reactivation department is 1-800-331-0500.
Total cost for stupidly switching to Sprint: $36 (Sprint's activation fee).
Sprint 3G, downtown Louisville, Ky.
I was getting horrible speeds on Sprint's 3G network (sub-100 kbps in a metro area), so I called AT&T to see if they would let me come back.
To my surprise, they reactivated my account, reversing the early-termination fee and letting me keep my grandfathered unlimited data and $10 text messaging plans. And I wasn't required to start another 2 year contract; I picked up right where I left off.
The number I was given for the reactivation department is 1-800-331-0500.
Total cost for stupidly switching to Sprint: $36 (Sprint's activation fee).
Sprint 3G, downtown Louisville, Ky.
Last edited by a moderator:
I am on Sprint, ans just got my iPhone yesterday. Speeds feel about the same as my pervious smartphones. But I have noticed that over the past 3 months coverage has changed in my local area. Places that used to have good coverage have dropped a bit. On the flipside, areas where coverage was so-so have increased. It is definitely a mixed bag.
What this test doesn't show is that Sprint (and Verizon) slow down to 0 mbs during a phone call (no multitasking!)
http://gizmodo.com/5820965/the-great-iphone-4s-national-network-test
http://gizmodo.com/5820965/the-great-iphone-4s-national-network-test
I've mentioned this in other threads, but my Sprint has been fine. I've been getting anywhere from 700kbs to 1200kbps and have had great voice coverage as well. Sprint is a great carrier in the LA area and has always worked fine for me when I travel aside from some coverage problems up in Montana.