San Antonio, TX 78229 Carrier Reviews & Coverage Maps

Sprint

(1 star) | Huebner | Bandera, San Antonio, TX 78240 | May 31, 2014

I had to choose a location in San Antonio for my review. I picked half-way between our home and our business (they're 3 miles apart), but we travel all over town so the review covers most of the city. Two of our 3 lines are used primarily for our business. We experience incredibly poor service regardless of where we are in and around San Antonio. We switched to Sprint from AT&T in October 2013 (I am sooo sorry I did that!). It's been almost 9 months now and I'm counting down the remaining 15 months. Since we rely on this phone service for our livelihood, I think we will soon be fed up enough to just pay the early termination fee. And you can better believe when the call quality is poor (the majority of the time), we apologize to our clients, telling them we are ever so sorry that we switched to Sprint a few months ago. It doesn't matter if it's talk, text, or data, the service is appallingly poor. Horrible voice echoes, static, and a tremendous number of dropped calls. A couple weeks ago for one conversation I had to repeatedly call back because the call dropped 7 times... seriously?!? My embarrassment was profound and you can imagine what our client thought. Voice mails pop up but there are no missed calls. This never happened with AT&T. When we do get a call it usually rings 3, **maybe** 4 times, and goes to voice mail (which takes from 5 minutes to more than an hour to show up). If I manage to answer in time, the person on the other end tells me they were about to hang up because it rang so many times on their end. We also rely heavily on texts in our business and they take an eternity! On average, sending take 5 to 20 minutes and sometimes longer. And once sent? It **typically** takes 5 minutes to more than an hour for it to be received at the other end. Note that these problems are routine, almost the norm. Service doesn't come close to comparing to what Sprint advertises, nor does the price. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We've had texts take over 6 hours to get to the recipient. We have 3 iPhone 5s and about 30% of text messages between my husband and myself end up sent as standard text messages instead of mms. The same occurs between us and others who have iPhones. And data speeds? Being able to use 4G or LTE is a **rare** occurrence. Data usage is slower than molasses in January (well, January up north anyway!). And the price??? Expensive! My original price estimate was considerably lower than my (then) AT&T bill, but now it's higher than our AT&T bill ever was. Yet I have no clue why. So we pay a premium price for sub-basement service. Laughably, we've been getting text messages from Sprint since January. January 18th Sprint's message said "Over the next month the new network will be largely completed in your area making it better than ever!" Three more messages three and four months later (April 23rd, May 23rd, and May 30th) said "We're continuing to make updates in your area. See how this affects your service" followed by a link to find out. I haven't had the patience to wait to see what's on the page the link directs me to. Four months of "improvements" but experience shows service quality continues to diminish. What ever they're doing... it's not working. Our former AT&T service had it's problems, but nothing even approaching the overwhelmingly poor quality of Sprint's service. I fell prey to Sprint's advertising claims (I should know better... I used to work in an ad agency!) San Antonio is the 7th largest city in the US... Sprint's service map shows excellent quality almost universally across the city, and even over much of Bexar County. I don't know how they measure it and who their third party is that verifies it, but the caveats in the fine print under the service map are the rule, not the exception. To say Sprint is misleading current and prospective customers is an understatement at best. The magnitude of the discrepancy is so large I wonder if the FCC could be persuaded to take a look at their service claims compared to what customers actually experience. For those reviewers in this forum who claim Sprint gives excellent service, I'd say they are very lucky, probably don't use their phone in more than one place in the city, and likely have very low usage rates compared to those of us experiencing Sprint's seriously inferior service. I've been reading reviews on this forum and many others to decide which company we should switch our service to. Right now it's still a toss up between returning to AT&T or trying Verizon. In our business we deal with very high-end clients and virtually all of them end up hearing that the poor quality of voice calls and texts started after we switched to Sprint. Sprint should keep in mind there are others like us. Our business has grown incredibly from word of mouth advertising. I'd have to say Sprint's market share is likely to shrink substantially for the same reason. All the TV and internet advertising (that we poor customers foot the bill for) in the world won't be much use once enough people experience the reality of their service and their pricing. Don't be fooled by enticements of great price, great service. Neither is true. I could provide dozens of references from our clients at the other end of our calls and texts that would attest to the sub-bargain basement quality that we pay a premium price for. I was picky and petty about my problems with AT&T and went looking for perfection. Just sign me... 20 / 20 hindsight...