In the news this week, Sprint, the phone company, is whining. Pardon me, my eye just rolled out of it's socket.
This news comes from 2 different Reuters articles here and here. Sprint is apparently the third largest cell provider, giving us even further evidence that size isn't everything. Sprint has posted a staggering loss of 683,000 monthly subscribers. This has caused their stock to drop close to 25% and in response they will unfortunately be eliminating 4,000 jobs and closing some stores. The reasons for this, they claim, is a result of losing business to their competitors, which I'm sure the iPhone craze has sent some subscribers to AT&T. Analysts (who ever that is) say the industry will be seeing a down-turn blaming a credit crunch for part of Sprint's woes.
Okay, back to the losing business to competitors part. This does not usually indicate a down-turn in the industry. There is a very quick, one line blurb about network and service problems but most of the message doesn't look at that. According to a recent J. D. Powers survey, Sprint is rated absolutely LAST in the list of providers for both network quality and service.
My cell service provider is Sprint. I can tell you that I'm not at all surprised by this news and I am dead certain it's because their service stinks! I didn't need the J. D. Powers info to understand this. While I haven't noticed too many network issues in the area where I live, but their customer service has to be the worst of any company on this planet. And we pay good money for that! What's worse is that they know it, admit it, and obviously don't care since they've done nothing about it. In fact from what J. D. Powers indicates we're paying more for horrendous service than to any other provider. Before reading any of this I have already been seriously contemplating a service change myself in spite of many in my family being on Sprint, allowing us free in-network calls. Yes, it's no surprise to me that Sprint is losing customers and I'd venture to say in the coming months there will be one more they can say goodbye to.
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