> I'm saying that as a loyal T-Mobile customer, but it's readily apparent that when I visit my parents in my small home town, or drive a few hours east to the beach towns near me, or really go anywhere much outside a major city, my service is poor or non-existent, and my Verizon-customer friends' service is fine.
Yeah, I think more testimonials are on your side here, so I don't doubt that T-Mobile subscribers face this issue, but it's strange to me, because I had exactly the opposite experience in reliability. Moving from Sprint to T-Mobile improved my reliability considerably.
Sprint would claim I had full bars, but downloads would stall out, webpages would just die half loaded. This was near their headquarters in Kansas City. T-Mobile's network has never crowded me off line, and has worked for me fairly consistently on the east coast.
Neither seemed to work very reliably in the long rural gaps between Kansas City and other metropolitan areas at the time. (Though I hear Sprint has I-70 covered fairly well now.)
I think part of my experience is driven by the fact on the spectrum of "voice user" to "web user," I'm really far to the right, probably outside of the mainstream. Could be T-Mobile's investments in data have come at the expense of their voice reliability? I'm not sure...
I guess if the main issue is T-Mobile's lack of coverage, then on net, things will improve after a merger. If the main concern is Sprint over-selling their network so that it becomes congested and unusable around 6 PM, then a merger is mostly just going to make things worse. It will be better in the short term, but as Sprint takes on subscribers, unless they change their strategy, they'll still overbook the lines.
T-mobile's strategy has generally been a higher quality network over a limited footprint. If your within their limited coverage area, coverage tends to be quite good. Wander outside it and it degrades rapidly.
Sprint coverage tends to be better, but their network has generally lagged behind in terms of technology.
Yeah, I think more testimonials are on your side here, so I don't doubt that T-Mobile subscribers face this issue, but it's strange to me, because I had exactly the opposite experience in reliability. Moving from Sprint to T-Mobile improved my reliability considerably.
Sprint would claim I had full bars, but downloads would stall out, webpages would just die half loaded. This was near their headquarters in Kansas City. T-Mobile's network has never crowded me off line, and has worked for me fairly consistently on the east coast.
Neither seemed to work very reliably in the long rural gaps between Kansas City and other metropolitan areas at the time. (Though I hear Sprint has I-70 covered fairly well now.)
I think part of my experience is driven by the fact on the spectrum of "voice user" to "web user," I'm really far to the right, probably outside of the mainstream. Could be T-Mobile's investments in data have come at the expense of their voice reliability? I'm not sure...
I guess if the main issue is T-Mobile's lack of coverage, then on net, things will improve after a merger. If the main concern is Sprint over-selling their network so that it becomes congested and unusable around 6 PM, then a merger is mostly just going to make things worse. It will be better in the short term, but as Sprint takes on subscribers, unless they change their strategy, they'll still overbook the lines.