Live from the Austin Admirals Club with T-Mobile! 1.15 Mbps according to the CNET speed test.

90 minutes of frustration with sprint pcs

Early on in the process of trying to activate my Sprint PCS Connection 1X card, I looked at my cell phone battery and laughed that if took too long I would have to re-charge my Kyocera 3035 mobile phone (used on Verizon). By the end of the process, the battery was dead, and still I had not activated my card. I’m going to return it tomorrow and go with Verizon, but first, some of the scenes from Sprint Customer Care Hell.a

After deciding I needed to have full high speed connections everywhere, with my laptop or desktop, I decided I had should try Sprint again. My last experience was horrible, but maybe this time…

I purchased a Novatel Wireless 1XRTT 3G card : $250 at Radio Shack.

Customer call 1 (dropped after 1 transfer and 10 min)
Customer call 2 (4 transfers, 7 min each: customer care, to web tech support1, to web tech support 2, to customer care who told me the computer had gone down…to call back in 2 hours or more)
Customer call 3 (4 transfers, 9 min each average, customer care, web support, customer support, PCS vision support, after 40 min, quit and decided to return the card)

Three of the people who I really thought could help me admitted this was the first time they had tried to activate a card. A couple of the reps had no idea what I was trying to do, and all of them asked me, at one time or another during the call, for my sprintPCS phone number. It did not matter that I had told all of them that I was trying to activate the card and had no number. They kept asking me for my number anyway. I gave up in the end without a number or service.

Total time with Sprint on the phone was well over 1 hour, and in the end a part of my life was gone and was no closer to getting mobile data than earlier in the day. I was planning on getting their unlimited plan ($100/month). I’m shocked I was not able to buy this service. Nothing had become better in the 6 years since my first activation. The experience with my neopoint phone 3 years ago was worse than the first time, and this card situation was the worst of all time.

The customer care with TMobile WiFi hotspot service was so much better!