I’ve been a Sprint CDMA customer for the better part of 10 years. I was a Nextel subscriber prior to that since 2001 in the iDEN days. Had AT&T less than a year and a half, when I bought the iPhone, when it first came out, but kept a Nextel flip phone since AT&T’s reception was beyond horrid in most the areas I’d frequent, When I graduated from the iPhone to Android, I went back to Sprint. Had them for a while and then did a brief stint with Verizon, and then back to Sprint where I’ve been since 2013.
Sprint has had some major improvements. To say Sprint doesn’t care about rural areas is not the experience in my neck of the woods. One of the very first LTE sites in upstate NY was in the little town of Dansville, about an hour south of Rochester. In the Buffalo market, the first four towers that were lit up were two near the airport, one on a very rural stretch of a major road, and one in the rural village where I work. That was the whole reason I switched back to Sprint, plus the unlimited data. I couldn’t get a stable Verizon signal in our manufacturing plant, AT&T reception is nonexistent in the village, so it was back to Sprint. Speeds, are great on LTE, while I’ve never busted 90 Mb down, I’ve been very close.
A lot of rural areas in the Southern Tier of NY that previously only had 1X were upgraded to LTE before the bigger suburbs that had 3G for years. Thanks to Canada my area will probably never see LTE band 26, which doesn’t bode well for in building or underground reception. But I’ve been happy.
I don’t travel much but I typically take two one-week long road trips a year and have been generally satisfied with Sprint’s reception while traveling. I had fairly decent coverage in the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains two years ago. No problems in Delaware and along the coast of Jersey either later that year. Last year in NYC, had no problem pulling in 30+Mbps on floor 102 of the observatory at 1WTC, and I didn’t have a problem uploading the handful of photos I took with my phone to my NAS at home in Battery Park or Sleepy Hallow. This year back in WVA and the Ohio Valley Region, I had no major issues. I had wonderful reception in the Wheeling area, but absolutely nothing on the back-country roads traveling through a bunch of unincorporated townships on my way to Weston, but then again, my buddy with Verizon, had no service either.
I’m not here to defend every action of Sprint. They’ve done some pretty stupid things over the years but I have no problems with their service these days. Just about everyone I know has Verizon, there are exactly two places that I know of where when road tripping, I’ve had no service and another person with Verizon had great service. The Flight 93 Memorial outside of Shanksville, PA and one of my favorite restaurants of all time at a maple farm in the Southern Tier. Which is no big deal. Only disrespectful asshats would use a cell phone at one of the most somber and sacred pieces of land in the nation, and anything that helps minimize cell phone use in a restaurant, I am all for!
One of Sprints big problems has been getting adequate fiber backhaul to feed their towers. Verizon and AT&T have tons of fiber they can feed to their respective towers of their mobile service. Sprint has to largely depend on cable companies and the wireline arms of their wireless competition. Before Softbank bought Sprint, I was hoping, but knew it wouldn’t happen, that Comcast, Time Warner and Cox would team up to buy them. Those three were already involved in partnerships with each other in the TV business with InDemand and Music Choice and those three cable cos have an extensive fiber network, that could be used to power a good portion of Sprint’s towers. They’d have a vested interest in expanding their fiber foot print too. Why pay a competitor like Verizon for backhaul when you can expand and do it yourself. I would love to see Sprint and Charter combine forces.
