Love/Hate Sprint

Why do some people just not care?

Thursday, I called customer service because, after weeks of poor data connections, everything was failing.  I could not use my data connection on the mobile hotspot or on the phone, and even voice calls were distorted.

The person was remarkably interested and was working to help me.  He said that they had tower problems in the area (a first! well, the admission, anyway) and that engineers were working to resolve the situation within 72 hours, though those were working week hours.  (If you have problems on the weekend, there is no problem?)  I was really having trouble understanding the conversation because it was distorted but we got through it.

This person called several days in a row, asking about my connection and last night, another person called.  She mentioned that the work on the tower had been completed and wondered how things were.  I mentioned that it was mostly back to the way it was a week ago, but with some distortion during the phone call.  I mentioned that things had taken a turn for the worse about 6 weeks ago, so she looked into the tower information further.  She was seeing a lot of problems with requests being rejected and proceeded to open another ticket for that matter.

I got a call this morning and this third person wanted nothing more than to close the ticket.  Nothing I said mattered and she wanted yes/no answers to everything, as though asking "does this fit into our easily-achievable brand of marketing happiness?" actually works for people subscribing to their services.

After my recent trials of AT&T and Verizon, I know I'm better off with Sprint.  I just have to wonder how some people keep their jobs.

For a while, I've been in contact with another Sprint customer service representative, this time from the social media team.  He responded to an e-mail from a few days ago, and I updated him on the situation with "go-away-girl" from this morning.  He called later, apologized and said that her supervisor would be noted on the situation, and that he was able to see the outstanding problems and that there was an internal ticket open on the situation, but that the tower is due for at least one capacity upgrade on August 4th.  That goes with what I was already told the previous evening.  I can only hope that things come together.  When I joked that they could just drop in LTE connectivity, he didn't laugh, but said that they had a strict roll-out plan.

The company's ticket on my most-used tower must still be open.  Some of the day time speed is up there again, but Sunday/Sunday night/Monday morning, it was unusable again.

Update: I'm in the Philadelphia, PA area and I'm trying WiMAX, their original 4G technology.  It's used extensively in South Korea, Taiwan, Russia, and parts of Japan.  The trouble with Sprint's WiMAX is that it's in a higher frequency that makes it difficult to penetrate buildings.

So, I tried it in York, PA and it connected but that's all.  It didn't really work in the motel room, next to the window on the second floor.  Here I am now in Christiana, Delaware and it's working better than the 3G/EVDO or the motel's WiFi connection.  It's only registering average download speeds of about 2.8 Mbps but I just got 4.65 Mbps down with only 0.56 Mbps up and that's higher than the previous test.  I get that much from EVDO on the upload and I've exceeded 2.8 Mbps on download.  4.65 is almost as good as I was getting from Verizon's LTE in West Carrollton, OH and they're supposed to be sooooo amazing, right?

I haven't heard anything from Sprint, so I assume that they finished and my "it's working okay but not as great as it was" was enough to say goodbye.  Okay, whatever.