Sprint is still amusing me instead of amazing me

Since I moved to a rural area of California along I-5 and SR 99, I haven't seen more success in a great network experience than I had at the last place.

In fact, Sprint doesn't even have a store here, though they have 3 kiosks in malls (two of them in the same mall) about 15 miles from here.  The Sprint reseller in this town is next to SR 99 and is on the edge of LTE and a large roaming area.  The fact that I'm on another edge of those area is frustrating.  My bedroom has LTE near the street and 3G toward the back of the apartment complex and the phone searches for service in the middle.

Truth be told, Verizon is not really great here, so I'm not getting any real satisfaction on the computer or tablet.  It's just less worse.

Occasionally, I'll send a tweet to @sprintcare.  Recently, I asked @sprintcare why their reseller didn't get good coverage (there is a roaming hole near the shopping area), and I was told that the majority of the 95336 area was in the Fair rating.  It is, but that is Sprint's rating for "Virtually unusable".  Using Yelp to Check-in often results in a time-out after 3-4 minutes.

He completely ignored the large roaming area in town and told me to go check their AIRAVE device.  The last time I looked, it was not a portable device that I could take with me.  It also required a wired internet connection, which they were unwilling to provide the last time they pushed me toward the option.

Tell me why it is my responsibility to fix their network problems by paying more to use a device to work around their shortcomings.  I'd really like to know.

That said, I can see the LTE signal becoming stronger.  In recent days, it's working in the living room.  LTE works fine in the San Francisco Bay Area (around 50-75 miles away) in most places.  I have hope.  They're just not working as quickly as I expected.  It's already September and many places are not working with LTE as they should be.

I need more patience but this is something that is stretched far too thin since say, 2008, when I moved out of a strong area, before the death grip of Nextel took hold.

Update 2014.10.29: They have increased their LTE reach into my apartment, although it too often changes to 3G when I try to use it.  Service is slowly, incrementally improving.  I still receive too many timeouts at stores.  Sometimes, even in stronger areas.  I see too many times when the service switches between LTE and 3G and it's basically unusable unless I force it to ignore LTE.

Update 2014.11.18: The hole in Sprint's coverage is now gone from the map.  They've filled it with non-existent LTE.  My apartment is covered, also, with the strongest LTE possible--none of that Fair business.

Best LTE, yet frequent time-outs

Perfectly covered, yet 1xRTT often

Obviously, all of this time I'm spending on 1xRTT is in my imagination.  The multiple time-outs are also imagined, apparently.  It couldn't be the work of simple easily flowing orange on a map, because no company would ever cheat.

The only thing making sure I don't go to T-Mobile is that their service here isn't very good, either, and they're still working over a rather insecure GSM.  When VoLTE (Voice Over LTE) becomes available, I'd be glad to jump ship, although I don't talk much, but it only takes one call to give away information that someone else can use to empty your accounts and CDMA may not be great, it's secure.

Going to Verizon would be expensive and going to AT&T would be stupid, since it's likely they will still overcharge, plus as many people here complain about them as love them.  Verizon's service for my mobile hotspot is good but not incredible.

Update 2014.12.09: I had a little chat with @sprintcare recently and they said that the roaming area is still visible to them.  When I finally Tweeted the maps I saw (like those above), they didn't reply at all.

I went to talk to someone at a Verizon store and they played a little game on the price of service, at $40 more than I had found on their web site.  I was uncomfortable giving that person a commission for withholding the best deal from me.

I went to the local Sprint reseller and said "Give me a reason to stay with Sprint." and he did but there is a still a lot of hope for the future.  However, I saw something on CNBC's app today where they finished the Stockton area and the service is much better.  That city had horrible service.  10x from 0.30 Mbps is a good improvement for 3G service.

The only real problem with the report is that they jumped over the city where I live, choosing to modify the map.  They may do more--they should do more because the Sprint reseller is also on the edge of the roaming zone.

Now that I have a three band LTE phone, it seems as though the service is somewhat better.  They weren't planning to turn on Spark (three band LTE) over here, but if they have 800 MHz and 1900 MHz, that would be good.  If the 2500 MHz band they got with Clear isn't supported here, that's okay.  If it's only 1900 MHz and 2500 MHz, that would be so-so.

2015.02.14: After a roughly 450 mile trip to San Diego and then, to Disneyland, and back, I think that Sprint still has much more to do across the state.  However, it's good to know that they're taking care of the area around their headquarters continually, since the people working for the company aren't paying as much as the other customers are.  At least, they're not blaming their customers as AT&T always do.

Sprint LTE: +70 = 300 markets

Sprint has officially announced another 70 markets for LTE here.

I'm not sure why Salem, Ohio (or most of the new markets) is important.  I see plenty of tourist destinations, so maybe the Sprint executives are making certain that they have adequate service where they travel.  At this point, I suspect adequate is all they'll get.

While trying to use 3G anywhere near the local shopping centers, all I got was the digital equivalent of static.  What was normally lousy data service was reduced to a lack of service.  For all the data capacity upgrades they've implemented in the past 1.5 years, they still need to increase capacity (probably) 4 times to handle a heavy load.

When LTE is available,  and customers find that LTE is faster, they'll buy devices to match, and use the extra speed to capacity, and we'll be back at merely adequate service again, but this time on LTE.  Maybe, it will return 3G performance to something reasonable--or maybe, it will exceed LTE's performance, given that a lot of the abusers will not be using 3G/EVDO.  I could swear when I've been at several businesses, we had procedures for capacity planning.  Why Sprint is unable to do this well is beyond me.  Surely, using income from data plans and data options (US$10 smart phone fee, anyone?  That should have gone directly to capacity upgrades.) would help fund maintenance and upgrades.  For all the concern about hiring talent at the top levels, the U.S.A. doesn't seem to be concerned about properly operating a business, but only concerned about extracting the most money.

Of course, Sprint could increase the price of their plans but that would likely push so many customers away that they'd be out of the postpaid business in short time.

Regardless, I'm happy to see that they're making progress, filling that map, although Verizon will surely use the same (green?) map from the first half of 2013 to accentuate their differences.  Verizon know that the other three have made quite a bit of progress in the second half of 2013, but that doesn't encourage customers to switch.

Update 2014.01.03: I am continually impressed with the company's progress in this area.  They have apparently spread LTE to all sorts of tiny (30-100 people) towns such as Fort Recovery, OH and Arcanum, OH while completely missing the boat with small cities.  I even noticed that they have data speed upgrades (read LTE, from my experience in other such marked areas, although in Indiana it seems to be that they're putting in old equipment to move the area from 1xRTT to EVDO, probably Rev. 0) in open areas without an associated town of any kind.  I certainly hope that they're working on this town because service was unusable during holiday shopping and it hasn't recovered much, as though most of the capacity is gone.  It's too bad that the technician isn't forced to use the service.  If he was, the work might be a bit more thoughtful toward the customers' needs.  (I'm currently trying to save this blog entry--after 7 tries, it's still not able to be saved.)

Update 2014.01.21: I got a text message from Sprint today:

I'm actually somewhat hopeful that things are changing, even though bandwidth seems severely constrained at the moment.  On Monday, I was in the small city of Eaton, OH using their LTE, which has yet to be announced.  Instead of the 7 Mbps I was receiving previously, I only got 2.48 Mbps, and there was a hole where 3G/EVDO showed up and that wasn't there previously.  It almost looked as if they'd re-deployed equipment already.

The creep of LTE starts to engulf small towns

Of course, the text message I received says to me that out of 4 towers in town--there should be at least 5 but they've ignored a large area south of town--should be equipped but I'm not exactly convinced.  I was expecting everything from the noted area on the coverage map east to the Ohio state line to be covered, but that may be more hope than reality.