The city I used to live in was big enough for an NFL team and Sprint specifically claimed to have a local 4G network, but it was really limited to a few upscale neighborhoods. Even then, when I was in a place I could get a good signal, it wasn’t half as fast as the Verizon 4G I’m getting anywhere in my new, much smaller town.

Phone quality? Well, Sprint wasn’t bad. Verizon hasn’t been bad either, but there was one day I did have pretty bad reception.

I’m sure that everyone likes to play gotcha games with the contracts too, but it is really suspicious for Sprint to offer a new unlimited plan so soon after saying unlimited plans were too expensive for them. Either they got burned by a lot of angry ex-customers like myself, or they’re setting up a bait & switch. I’m hoping it’s just the former, but I wouldn’t recommend signing up to find out!

Oh, by the way, after disputing the debt through collections and filing a complaint with the BBB, Sprint has backed off 2/3rds of the claimed bill and isn’t even trying to get the cancellation fee anymore.

Also consider that what 3G signal you get may be determined by where you live and the carrier. I have a friend down the road with Verizon. And although Verizon offers decent 3G/voice coverage for my county, they can’t get any cellphone service inside their house even though they’re just a mile or two from a larger road. People need to check their local maps and talk to friends/family in their local area.

Bottom line is all the major carriers are sneaky and will lock people into horrible long contracts. It’s a sort of monopoly where only a few big companies dominate most markets, and where contracts are a million pages and are often changed midway through without customer’s permission.