The "least bad" option?
Written: Feb 06 '01 (Updated May 07 '01)
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Pros: price, reception
Cons: billing, dealing with changes of service, false advertising
The Bottom Line: Mobile phones are great. Service providers are not. Sprint is the best of a horrible lot.
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| jrgoodman's Full Review: General Reviews of Sprint Customer Service |
In the rest of this article, I beat up on Sprint, so you may wonder why I'm recommending them. The answer is that most of my complaints are really against the industry, and Sprint is no worse than the others. In fact, for the things that matter to me, they're the best.
I have had SprintPCS service for six months. I chose them over the others after a lot of reading and asking friends who had different services. I probably would choose them again (actually, I do choose them again every month that I don't switch companies, since I have no contract--all I have invested is the phone). The quality of service is reasonable, though they tend to have less coverage than most of the other carriers. And the digital part that allows you to hear a pin drop is NOT an advantage, regardless of how they advertise it. It means that to save bandwidth, they are constantly cutting off transmission if the sound drops below a certain threshold. That means conversations often get very choppy.
Sprint's pricing structure is no more reasonable than any other company in the industry, but for the way I use the phone, it is among the cheapest plans. Unlike most of their competition, it's possible at least to figure out with reasonable accuracy what they're going to charge you (or at least what you're agreeing to pay, so that you can go back and complain when they get it wrong).
Now for what I don't like about Sprint. Their pricing structure is completely unreasonable, their response to problems or complaints is awful, their web site is consistently one of the slowest web sites I ever connect to, and their service areas are severely limited.
Pricing. Any plan that charges you for a fixed number of minutes per month and doesn't allow you to carry them over, then charges a much higher rate if you go over, is unreasonable. I hate it. But they all do it. I think it's so that they can advertise artificially low rate computed by assuming that you use exactly the number of minutes you contracted to use, no more and no less. But Sprint carries it a step farther. Their web site is actually pretty good--if incredibly slow--and provides you with (nearly) up-to-the-minute information about your usage. The problem? 48 hours before the end of your billing period, this information is turned off: "Your account usage is temporarily unavailable while we prepare your bill. Your account usage will be available again in 2-3 days. Thank You for your patience."
So at the very time you'd like to optimize your usage, knowing that you are close to using all your minutes but wanting to avoid the very high charge for going over, they make it unavailable. Do you think this is an accident? They should be thanking us for our gullibility, not our patience.
All the mobile phone companies compete with advertising that is patently misleading, but Sprint seems worse than others. Their web site currently is offering 2000 minutes for $49.99. Sounds good, but 2000 minutes is more than an hour a day! And this offer requires that you use 80% of your time before 7AM, after 8PM, or on weekends! And you pay $.40/min if you average more than 18 minutes a day between
7AM and 8PM. Oh, yes, and in the last two days of the period, you can't find out how much you've used.
Service. Do you really believe it when they say, "Your call is very important to us."?
Service Areas. I think they only cover about 10% of the U.S. And it's really expensive to make calls if you're outside of their coverage. Fortunately, though I travel a lot, I'm rarely out of their service areas, which cover almost all large metropolitan areas and many interstate highway routes, even in rural areas. However, even in the areas they do serve, their service seems to be more fragile than others. I work in a large building. In the middle of the building, I'm one of the few people whose phone doesn't work.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): $60/month
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Epinions.com ID:
jrgoodman
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Reviews written: 3
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