Sprint Having Speed Issues with iPhone 4S

Yeah I have had this experience. Returned a Motorola Photon on Sprint for the iPhone 4S, and although browsing, pandora, youtube do work fine, it definitely is significantly slower when it comes to downloading things. The app store is almost unusable.

My photon was doing just fine a few weeks ago, so I am pretty sure its not Sprints network, at least near my house.

Do you guys think it is a hardware issue or a software issue that can be fixed via an update or something?

 

I don't know, but it's killing me. I expected to see a bit of a slowdown when I switched from AT&T, but this is ridiculous. I'm running Speedtest and routinely seeing download speeds of LESS than 100kbs. I'm thinking of jumping to Verizon, but it's only been a few days... let's see what they say.

 

I've already returned my Sprint iphones due to the horrendous slow speed. I do not believe it was a radio issue. I believe it is a fundamental overloading of Sprints 3G data network.

12 midnight EDT = 1-0.9 mbps (acceptable)
8 am EDT 0.6 mbps (no worse than Verizon's day average)
9 am EDT 0.3 mbps (getting slow)
10 am EDT 0.15 mbps (crawling)
12 noon EDT 0.05 mbps (useless)

meanwhile, I tested my 3G iPad laptop (AT&T) side by side and at each of those times it was getting 1.2 mbps pretty consistently. Web pages that took 15 s to load took 4+ minutes on Sprint iphone pretty consistently.

Since the iPhone was getting good speeds at what one would expect to be lower usage times of the day, but dropped as the day wore on, this would seem pretty consistent with network overloading.

FWIW speaking with a Verizon subscriber here in Ann Arbor, which also uses CDMA, Verizon has a similar problem with the network slowing down through the day, although speeds do not crawl down to quite the slow speeds Sprint showed.

What a waste of time for me. Since I ordered the phones by mail, I have to send them back to get credited by UPS. I should have gone to AT&T.

 

Same for me on Sprint. Web browsing and streaming Pandora/Rdio works fine, but downloading even a 5MB app takes forever. Coupled with the fact that I random get put into roaming mode with a 5-bar signal, I'm really thinking about returning the phone and going with Verizon.

I'll give it until the end of this week to see if anything changes.

 

To those of you who are thinking about switching and use Radio Apps such as Pandora, do you think you'll go over the imposed 2GB of internet use the other companies offer, that is another reason why I am thinking about switching to AT&T, I don't know if 2GB is enough. What do you think?

 

To be honest, since Pandora works fine i used it pretty much all last night. For at least an hour. I didn't use more than 40mb of data of streaming pandora for an hour.

i guess it depends on how much you plan on using it, but for short commutes, you would definitely be fine

 

I had sprint for 18 months or so , had Verizon and AT&T , Verizon had great service for me but it was too expensive when I switch from Verizon to sprint I was saving $40-$45 at months , AT&T well area where I live in las Vegas was knew so they had too many problems and decided to leave them

Now to sprint speeds , idk about iPhone getting lower speeds but one day I was testing iPhone 4 on Verizon vs the droid incredible , side by side and the incredible alway got higher mbps on the test I thought it was weird, but so far I seen it more then once so idk if that counts , in still on sprint and got me the iPhone 4s you guys were freakin me out all this weekend about sprint speeds but to me they seen normal and I can't do everything that I was able to do with my evo 3d, I usually watch some YouTube , pandora, twitter , read articles , download a few apps during the day etc .

 

You can return your phones at a Sprint corporate store even if you ordered online. I returned mine on Sunday after using for 2 days. The speeds were abysmal and I didn't want to risk getting locked in a 2 year contract with them.