Good and bad news—
The good news for San Franciscans lining outside Sprint stores last Friday was that the lines were tolerable and an iPhone was finally available to Sprint customers. The bad news is that some new iPhone 4S owners are reporting really slow connection speeds on Sprint’s network.
The users speak out
On Sprint’s community forum, a thread has started under the title:
“iPhone 4S on 3G network too slow to be useful.”
iPhone 4S users who thought the incidents of slow network speeds on Sprint were probably just isolated cases, suddenly found that the occurrences were more widespread, if not sporatic.
Slower than a snail
Beeay, a Sprint community forum member, said that using the much touted voice recognition system, Siri, was ridiculous:
“Have you tired Siri? It will say ‘Sorry I am having trouble connecting to the network’. This speed is ridiculous, too slow to use the function provided by iPhone. I couldn’t even imaging how would navigation work at this speed when it has to load maps on demand.”
“jf1957,” a customer of Sprint for many years said that slow connection speeds are nothing new:
“Take it from a long time Sprint [customer] of 12 years. This is what Sprint has been giving us for speeds the last year or so.
“That’s why they are upgrading to LTE over the next two years but it doesn’t help 3G at all currently and with the load of iphone users coming to Sprint for unlimited data, I fear it is only going to get worse.”
Give it time
There were other users on the Sprint forum who believed that the slow connection speeds were only a temporary thing and that a little time should be given to Sprint to “get their act together.”
Some forum users indicated that since there was a 14-day return policy for the iPhone 4S, they were considering returning their phones and jumping to another carrier to get better network speeds if things didn’t improve on Sprint’s network.
No word
Forum members were urging Sprint to address the concerns presented but as of this writing, no official word has come from Sprint yet.
But keeping silent on this issue is not only bad policy, it may find that its new cache of iPhone 4S customers may make a sprint to other wireless carriers for their wireless needs.
Written by: Frank Ling on Monday, October 17, 2011 – 12:35 PM
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