Don't Count Out Sprint Just Yet

In the last two years, Sprint seems to have been inched into the shadows while Verizon (News - Alert) Wireless and T-Mobile – whose hyped-up gadgets, news partnerships have spurred market dominance -- have stolen the sunlight.

 

But recent third-party studies indicate that the No. 3 wireless carrier’ s Sprint’ (News - Alert) s network quality is improving faster than its competitors – in fact, Sprint’ s 3G network has been called the most reliable in the nation’ s major metropolitan areas. Sprint is also the only wireless provider that has an up-and-running 4G network, according to some news reports.

 

Still, 148,000 customers ended their service with Sprint in the last three months of 2009 (good news if you consider 1.3 million customers left during the same period a year earlier). Perhaps that’ s because Consumer Reports recently rated Sprint’ s customer support as the worst by far among the so-called Tier-1 carriers.

 

It remains to see what will happen when 4G really takes off.

 

“Our network is underappreciated by our customer base,” said Bob Azzi (News - Alert), Sprint’s senior vice president of networks, during a recent interview. “It’s hard to change customer perceptions.”