Sprint: "Ignore your customers and they'll go away."

Years ago Sprint was considered cutting edge. I remember buying my first Sprint handset. It was about the same mass as one of today's camcorders but of course phone-shaped. It did not have a color screen - just black-on-grey LCD dots to form letters. If I recall correctly it was a Sony. Not Sony Ericsson but just Sony. It was "dual band" - but that meant that it had the ability to use analog cellular service as well as Sprint's new digital technology. Digital coverage was limited in scope and a purely digital handset was not a good idea if you ever went even a little bit out of the city.

GSM didn't appear in the marketplace until about a year later - a company called Voicestream did an even more limited buildout in our state.

Sprint's focus was simply adding customers. Add customers, advertise how great it is. But at the same time they added few towers and even fewer customer service reps. 611 was a free call - but your battery was not going to out-last the hold time. Want to call customer "care"? Plug your phone into the charger and be prepared to wait 90 minutes or more.

Dead spots on the network stayed that way. Hold times for customer service never got shorter.

The bills you'd get were sometimes incomprehensible. But if it was within a few percent of the price you were expecting - may as well just pay it. They sure could cash a check.

And they kept adding customers without adding towers. Dropped calls got more common when you'd start a call on one tower and be handed off to a tower that had no capacity for it. Did I mention that the dead spots on the network just stayed that way?

I dropped Sprint in 2001. Left the USA in 2003. When I returned in 2005 I asked around. "Sprint is still just as bad if not worse," was the word. I re-established a data service with them this year when the technology/price was just too good to pass up and the word was that customer service had improved as well as coverage.

Both of those are true - but Sprint's cost-saving business decisions to just add customers without capacity or support for the customers got them a well-earned bad reputation. I just read an article about how Sprint has fallen on hard times, having had a net loss of 614,000 customers.

It doesn't surprise me in the least.