Let me just go on the record as saying that I don’t necessarily believe that my recent experience with Sprint represents the entirety of the company. I’m sure their areas that get much better service and customer service representatives that do their job quite well. This is just my personal experience. Yours may be different than mine

After being a Sprint customer for many years, with a brief break to explore greener pastures, the Lost and Tired family is saying goodbye to our longtime cell carrier.

Here’s the problem that we along with millions of other customers are facing, data speeds. 

Data on the Sprint network, at least in the areas of Ohio that I frequent, is essentially useless. Personally, I’m someone who uses a good bit of data. We are always at the doctors or therapists for the boys and it’s nice to be able to stream Netflix for the boys.  However, while on the Sprint network, that has only been possible via WiFi because the 3G data is too slow.

Truthfully, I can’t download an app from the market or upload a post and picture to this site, unless I’m on WiFi.

In some cases, I can’t even poll my email either.

Some of you might be thinking that perhaps my expectations are too high. I’m sorry, but I beg to differ. Sprint advertises itself as the nations most reliable 3G network. In my experience, that simply isn’t the case.

Personally, I don’t even care that 4G is non-existent. I just want decent 3G speeds and as far as I’m concerned, 1,500ms ping, 100kbps down and 50kbps up doesn’t qualify as decent in my book. It shouldn’t in yours either. Especially when having to pay an extra $10 per line for Premium Data.

Sure the unlimiteddata plans are nice. However, I have to ask myself, what’s the point of unlimited data if it’s unusable?

The other issue I have been having is with Sprints customer service.

Generally speaking, Sprints customer service has been a mixed bag. It varies greatly from representative to representative and while many are very friendly, getting accurate information is difficult at times.

Something else I found troubling is the lack of proper notation on my account. Here’s the latest example from my own personal experience.

We have been having huge service issues since May, when we switched back from Verizon. The problems ranged from voice and data, to testing and forced roaming on the Verizon Network. I have put in several network tickets and nothing ever happened.
It was frustrating because the engineer’s would come back and say the network was fine and yet the issues remained. When I would call back with the same issues, tech support would say that they show issues with the network in my area. The ticket would get kicked back to the engineers. It went back and forth, over and over again.

Sprint, to their credit can only do so much and some of the representatives really tried to help but their hands were tied.

The straw that broke the camels back for me was that I was told in the beginning of November, that I would be receiving a $536 credit on my account. This was for all the troubles and it had just been approved. The credit was to be issued and show up on my December 5th bill.

It never showed up.

In fact, when I spoke to Sprint on December 8th, they have record of the actual call but not of its contents. At least not the part about the credit.

No documentation, no credit. Sprint once again, left me holding the bag, or this case, a phone that doesn’t work well due to substandard network conditions.

Even after speaking to a supervisor, I was out of luck.

How does that happen?

How can they tell me that their system shows a $536 credit that will post to my account on December 5th and have there be absolutely no record of it?

Computer glitch? Perhaps, it was the same computer glitch that canceled the insurance on all my lines causing me to have to pay out of pocket for replacement devices during the network troubleshooting with the engineering department?

The truth is, I really want to like Sprint. I really do. If I didn’t care about what I was paying for, I probably wouldn’t be leaving.

However, I can’t work from my mobile device because the networks performance is so poor. WiFi is definitely an option, but it’s not everywhere. Plus, I’m paying for a service that shouldbe allowing me to do just that, work from the road.

Admittedly, I’m not always the easiest costumer to please. I educate myself on what I should be getting and expect that to be the case.

I’m also not looking for perfection. I’m looking for some level of usability, higher than what Sprint is apparently able to provide me at this time. The promises of improvements fall short of believability for me because they’ve promised this before.

Does anyone remember the whole 4G wimax debacle?

I’m really hoping that Sprint gets their act together because they are a good company. They’ve done right by me for many years. However, no amount of history makes it easier or more affordable to deal with terrible service.