The Decline of Sprint...What Happened?
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- čas přidán 15. 08. 2023
- One of the biggest names in telecommunications is gone. This video talks about the history of Sprint while attempting to identify the biggest reasons behind its decline.
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Correction: Sprint originated from the *Southern* Pacific Railroad, not the *South* Pacific Railroad as I stated in the video. I apologize for the mistake and appreciate all the viewers who told me about it. Other than that, I hope everyone likes the video.
How dare you make a mistake? I’m totally unsubscribing lmao jk
can u do vid on gabes
You missed in 1996 Sprint long distance got phracked for about $64,000,000 in toll calls.
I have a story about that.
Lmfao do people actually cry their eyes out about these tiny little mistakes. 99.99% of people watching will never notice much less care
Unprofessional and fake news. Feel ashamed...ASHAMED!!!!!!!
Sprint's customer service was awful even by the low standards of telecom companies. Their corporate motto should've been "We're not happy until you're not happy."
That's a GOOD one lol.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
In my opinion the poor customer service is what doomed sprint. You just can’t treat customers with that kind of contempt so long as you have competition.
I was with Sprint for my first cell phone and kept them for a lot longer than I should have. I had asked several times to not receive sales calls about plan offers and they stubbornly refused to accept that request. They would always insist that it was fine since it didn't count against my minutes, and finally I just had to scream my ass off at the poor guy on the other end that I would cancel my service if I ever received another sales call from them. That's how hard you had to push just to get them to stop cold-calling you all the time.
I actually do remember this, that was the reason why my father switched with Verizon because of their service.
Sprint was pretty awesome if you lived in a city with good sprint coverage and never really went out of town
😂😂😂
😂😂😂
😂😂😂
I've used all carriers but sprint . The closest I got was shortly after the T-Mobile sprint merger, you could force an iPhone too use the sprint network by choosing a specific code. I think you could also do it during covid
So it was like TMobile
I remember Sprint ads everywhere and all of a sudden nowhere. I know people had problems with Sprint, but it feels like someone I knew but was never close to got murdered and nobody cared.
It was just very bizarre how quiet their death was.
As a NASCAR fan is kinda weird to think that Sprint is gone. For those who don’t know Sprint/Nextel was the title sponsor of the NASCAR cup series from 2004-2016.
I grew up thinking that Sprint was a huge company that was doing well and spending millions on the nascar deal because of that. It’s kinda wild to say the one of the most recognizable brands to ever be involved with NASCAR no longer exists.
its weird to not have a title sponsor for the cup series anymore
Not ragging on NASCAR but just to put things into perspective NASCAR only makes a yearly revenue of about 80-100 million compared to larger sports like the NBA that easily rakes in 10 billion dollars every year in profit. NASCAR is not a very big market and is more niche
@@eligreg99This is true for all auto racing in general. Before NASCAR signed their Nextel title sponsorship, RJ Reynolds essentially subsidized NASCAR's growth from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. The same was true of Philip Morris subsidizing both Formula 1 and what was then known as CART, but more commonly known as IndyCar. Once the tobacco money went away in the mid-2000s because of the Master Settlement Agreement, auto racing shrank in stature and awareness substantially. What kept NASCAR afloat in the mid-2000s were their massive TV rights fees.
I’m a bit older and don’t follow NASCAR but my biggest memory of NASCAR is the Marlboro Cup….another huge sponsor name that although still exists, is no longer allowed to advertise
The Winston Cup brother
I will never forget driving past their headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas... and having 1/5 bars of signal.
FACTS. Sprint was HOT GARBAGE.
LOOOOL BRUTAL
Lmao
As a former Sprint employee I can tell you they didn't care about their customers at all, we were even told to tell customers "your tower is under maintenance" when they complained about signal loss, even though the customer would be in a no coverage area. It was a blessing in disguise when they laid of 4000+ of us and sent our jobs overseas.
We know.. theyve been saying that since 2003
Geez i have T-Mobile Magenta Max with my iPhone 13Pro and the service is trash. When I went to tell the store they said the exact same thing. “The towers are out rn” bs
100$ payments lol I never ever got one even when everyone did lol
Sprint didn’t have towers across Nebraska and T-Mobile only has coverage when they roam on at&t
@@michaeljimenez410 Verizon is pretty good, but costs a bit more I believe.
You should have mentioned how Sprint got so big in their heyday (2000-2003?), because they were the only ones to offer no long distance or roaming charges, which for many customers meant reasonable bills, less than half what others were charging. Back then, roaming didn’t mean using another provider’s network, it just meant leaving your county! So this was a huge advantage, and it took the other carriers about 3 years to finally cave and stop charging roaming & LD. After that point, sprint struggled and grew slower than all the other companies.
They had a customer service call center here in Central Florida; it was notorious for having paramedics showing up several times a day due to employees having constant heart and panic attacks, the threat of the girl from HR showing up to your desk with a box from not meeting metrics/selling enigmatic products that did nothing.
Was it in the Tampa area? Computer Generated Solutions had a call center there, and they were contracted out to Sprint.
Probably the Keller site.
I gave them a try twice. Sprint had hands down the worst customer service year after year. They knew it and did absolutely nothing to fix it. Their demise was inevitable. And no one misses them.
They probably knew they were getting laid off and no longer give a shit, that’s my guess I never had them personally
Customer service? We're in the 2020s. You don't been to talk to people anymore dork
Couldn’t agree more. I had them in college and moved to Verizon after that. Never looked back.
Funny enough every time I view sprint it was amazing customer service. Extremely easy and relatively cheap. I guess YMMV
I worked for Sprint customer service for 6 months. They viewed the customer service employees as an unnecessary expense that should be phased out. All of our training was dedicated to selling extra crap to callers. We had no ability to resolve technical problems, adjust bills, or offer realistic advice. It was a nightmare, I genuinely feel bad about the small part I played in their company because of how we treated people. I can remember one lady in particular sobbing about a $1500 phone bill because of an international call, just recalling the memory makes the pit of my stomach feel hollow.
The best thing I can say about Sprint is that when my family signed up for their service in 2007, after a few months they basically kicked us out and let us out of the 2 year contract without any penalty because their service was so spotty in our area and we were roaming too much, which was free for us, but costing them more than we were worth apparently.
You all were part of a group of 1,000+ customers Sprint ‘fired’ probably. Google ‘sprint fires customers 2007’
That’s hilarious… getting out of that contract was a blessing. Sad that they only cared because they were losing money. You weren’t profitable 😂
I remember that fiasco. Why invest in the network and serve more customers profitably, when you can just cancel their service and lose the revenue permanently? Think that sounds ridiculous? That’s because it is!
They bought a massive chunk of 4g spectrum in the low band range from a company called clearwire a few years after that. I'm surprised they didn't bounce back from the spotty coverage issue.
I was a Nextel customer when Sprint bought them out. I used to love my Nextel phone/2-Way radio. I used the 2-way radio WAY more than I used their celll phone service. I was so pissed when Sprint killed off the 2-way radio functions that I dumped them for a pre-paid cell.
My employers used the PTT service from Nextel I loved it. My sister worked for Nextel so we got cheap cell phone service dirt cheap. When they merged I left.
Same here Lol. Loved the nextel.
Me too I got caught in that trap because I was a Nextel customer and forced to go to Sprint
You know they have these cell structure world wide PTT radios out now - they look like a little square box with a shirt antenna and they use a sim no monthly service - check those out
It's just so sad that back in the late 90s-early 2000's they were TOPS. Great devices, zero complaints. I only got them as a carrier TOTALLY by accident. Saw a really cool cellphone they were selling to use Sprint IN A RADIO SHACK!!! I was hooked! What a spectacular downfall.
I was an operator at Sprint from 1991 to 1994 at 19 years old. Even only working part time from 6PM to 10PM at night 5 nights per week, they paid for my education. Tuition, books, etc. As a college student I couldn’t have asked for a better company to work for. Pretty good pay at the time and also paid education. I wish they would’ve made it as a company.
I mean they did make it as company for atleast a century but then they went downhill
Everyone else is glad they failed
I worked for them too. Even ended up marrying a hot coed who worked there too.
Ur tuition took em outta business
If anyone else said S.P.R.I.N.T was an acronym, I would have thought it was just part of the meme.
lol I love your videos
They SPRINTed to their death 😂
Also I've never had sprint, always been AT&T, T-mobile or MetroPCS
Bro it’s the reaper 😂
I love your videos
I remember their spokesperson the guy in glasses bailed on them and switched to T-Mobile
My family used Sprint for nearly a decade, and tbh, we never really had issues. The only times we’d lose service were in/at obvious places- vacationing on islands, hiking in the Appalachians, caving, thick concrete factories. I admit I only travel up and down the East and West coast tho. Looking at the coverage map, it seems they neglected the midwest lol.
True story: Sprints HQ campus was here in the South Kansas City area. The campus was larger than some small cities. You'd think that the best cell coverage in the city would be mear said campus, but you'd be wrong. In 2005 I lived in an apartment near the campus, and while my friends could get cell coverage anywhere in my apartment, I had to step onto the patio to make phone calls.
Yes. Came here for this comment.
Former customer and employee here. You hit the nail right on the head! Had Sprint skipped buying Nextel and spent that money upgrading the network to GSM/ lte and revamping customer service they would be the biggest wireless carrier today.
CDMA was the superior technology the only reason why GSM was seen as better is that it was cheaper to implement (as CDMA was owned by Qualcomm, and the licensing costs were outrageous) and as such was used in more places around the world (Hence the G stands for Global) since it was mandated by the EU.
@@ericdodson3630 I don't disagree. But given that, to me the choice was clear to go with GSM 🤷🏾
@ericdodson3630 Yes, but LTE is based off of GSM, meaning that it was bound to happen anyway
@@stellanstafford6025yeah I’ve never heard anyone say GSM was inferior to cdma
@@ericdodson3630
Cdma was not superior for smart phones. Originally you could not multi-task. Say you’re on the phone and wanna google a phone number - wasn’t possible
Never forget that the guy who did ads for version switch to doing ads for sprint.
And then sprint went under
@@wendellmotton4982so that sort backfired on his part.
I’ll bet he’s regretting that now
@@SheldonAdama17 You mean Paul? He used to do Verizon Wireless for his question "Can you hear me now?"
Can you hear the L?
I am apparently one of a few former Sprint customers that actually liked my service. As an employee of Lucent Technologies I can say that 99-02 was a wild time for telecoms.
No your not alone,❤them as well
Yea they tried the Midwest in select certain citie's and town's in the Midwest but they failed as VERZION, AT&T, TEEN MOBILE, & CRICKET had already dominated the regions of the Midwest!
When I bought my first cellphone back in 2002, Sprint was so far ahead of the game. While everyone else was using candybar style phones with monochrome displays, Sprint phones had full color screens and wireless web browsing. My Samsung N400 even had a miniature digital camera accessory that you could hook up to it to take pictures to share with other people on Sprint. This was completely unheard of at the time. My phone after that was an A600 with a built in camera and fully articulating flip screen. It seems archaic now but at the time it was so futuristic.
I had Sprint as my wireless provider from 2016 to 2018. It was absolutely horrible. I ride the bus almost everywhere I go; it's crucial to have music or videos to watch to pass the time while riding. I'm not exaggerating when I say my signal would be lost every two minutes. I ended up switching to Verizon after my device contract was up. The difference with Verizon was like night and day.
I work for AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Verizon jobs are #1 priority as we are very time crunched due to the time limits Verizon puts on repair of any problems at the tower in the contracts for work. This is why Verizon is so much more reliable even having less towers.
It's not surprising to lose signal in downtowns. You may want to look into something called books.
@moo1234hot I love to read, however, for some reason, if I read while riding the bus, I get motion sickness and get all dizzy and nauseous. For some reason, this doesn't happen while watching videos.
@@MasterMalrubiusYou don’t have to be insulting to get your point across though. 🙄
@@MasterMalrubius Jackass.
My dad used to have Sprint for the family. After months of price hikes and random fees (of which representatives literally couldn't explain) he switched. They called him to try to get him back and he lit into them, he was livid that it took no time at all for them to reach out when he switched but they were all too happy to slap on fake fees and have seemingly no one in the call centers. I'm glad they're gone.
My experience is very similar
Exactly!! The fees made absolutely no sense. One month you can be paying $150 for a 4 phone plan and the next $200+ like??? Idk if anyone experience this but how they wouldn’t tell you about the extra insurance you get on your phone thats $10 extra a month and dont realize it till later and you ask what its for and they tell you some BS how if you break your phone you can get a new one? But in reality just tell you to go to Apple or Sprint online to do that and they still tell you NO to a brand new phone?? Sooo we were just paying an extra $10 per phone for no reason?
We were paying less than now, my service is also worse and I have to wait an extra year to get a new phone for the same price
@@owwerules they were a crooked company just trying to survive by any means necessary. They deserved to be shut down.
So he yelled at someone who had no part in that and was just trying to do their job? Nice, what a guy
Like someone else said, if you live in the city that had pretty decent sprint coverage, they can be pretty awesome. When I had sprint for a while in Northern Louisiana and Nevada, reception and internet speeds were pretty good. Customer servic 3:52 e was their downfall.
Between 2005 and 2012 I tried AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint. Sprint was the one I stayed with until 2020. Service was fine in my area, and they offered cheaper easier to understand plans than the other 2. Unlimited text was something Sprint was doing better than Verizon and AT&T at one time. I always thought the biggest thing that hurt Sprint was the iPhone. Sprint did not have the biggest phone on the market. They did have the Android phones but so did Verizon and AT&T. At that time in the late 2000's early 2010's it was really the phone you wanted determined your carrier and Sprint never had one that made anyone feel the need to switch.
My grandpa was a maintenance of way employee of the Southern Pacific and he used Sprint on the job. The SP had its hands in a lot of businesses in California’s history.
I had sprint in the California foothills all the way up until they were bought out by T Mobile. More reliable service in my town than AT&T, but worse call quality.
I had completely forgotten about Sprint for years until I saw this video. It's so incredible how something so big can become so obscure. I can't even describe what the commercials were like and I saw them all the time
I'm old enough to remember some of the "pindrop" commercials first airing, but without the archive footage in the video to jog my memory I wouldn't have been able to tell you anything about them other than the "pindrop". It was really a meme before the term was defined. :)
I was in the sprint store buying a phone. The clerk had to borrow my mom’s straight talk phone to call his manager to the store. That was my experience with the service as well lol
I had sprint up until the T-Mobile merger. I enjoyed it. I liked the unlimited data, the downside to sprint was coverage area. It had dead zones. Also for the longest you couldn’t use data while being on the phone that was so stupid to me. That being said sprint was possibly a legacy company for me. My mom worked for them under the Nextel years. Overall 6.5/10. It had its issues no doubt but I genuinely liked them.
I used to work for sprint. The issue was always that it had prepaid coverage levels with postpaid pricing. It was just overpriced for the level of service, despite all the promos and deals making it cheap.
I also used to work for them and they got really desperate the last 5 years. They introduced new plans and promotions seemingly every few weeks, and nothing was profitable for the company. Sprint was so far behind the competition that the billions injected from softbank literally did nothing. They coverage and service was bad. I had Verizon the entire time I worked for Sprint because the service was so bad.
That's all I remember people ever saying about Sprint, that it was overpriced. But also that it had its lifer devotees who cursed the day they had to change services.
@@kittyprydex yeah if the service worked in your area it was awesome. Cheap, good, but if it didn’t work it sucked.
So for those who it did work for, losing it meant a price hike at a different carrier, which sucks.
As a former Sprint, now T-Mobile, employee on the IT side of things, I fully endorse this video. Well done (with a few minor missteps). The one thing you missed that happened pre-merger with Nextel that started the decline was the ION failed attempt. Several layoffs happened between 2001 and 2005, with that as a factor. Then after the Nextel merger, nearly annual layoffs (every year except two) began and continued until the merger with T-Mobile. And while the network had improved by that point, the brand was just too damaged, nearly went bankrupt in 2015, and although it could possibly have continued as a minor player for some time, the spectrum it owned put a target on it. By the time the T-Mobile merger happened Sprint was running with a skeleton crew, and the whole thing was teetering on the edge of a final death rattle (at least as far as being a major competitor in that arena), the culmination of one bad decision after another. From T-Mobile's perspective, while they did gain customers, the big prize was some much-needed spectrum.
So basically T-Mobile’s buyout was simply buying out the customer’s contracts before they all inevitably bailed.
T mobile is the worst. Sorry you work for a crap company.
@@TheQuadLaunchers Not exactly, the network fundamentals were pretty solid by that point .. we had 65M customers and were mostly soaking up the low end of the market. Not a great place to be, but not nearly as vulnerable as you imply.
But that's not what T-Mobile bought .. tmo bought us for the spectrum we held. The customer base was less of a factor. Sprint had very high churn all the way through. As the video said, folks didn't stick around once their promotional rate expired.
@@satsukeWas the sprint wireline service good? I know cogent owns it now
@@deepspacecow2644 sprint wireline was kind of left out in the cold since 2006 or so .. they were built out as pretty standard T carrier and MPLS that automatically switched over and such if there was an interruption. So high uptime and reliable as far as I could tell. The issue was that other companies were aggressively marketing metro Ethernet, OC carriers and all that while Sprint didn’t for whatever reason. There was plenty of fiber in the ground, but the technology made that physical plant moot because with DWDM would multiply the capacity of existing fiber every few months to years.
Towards the end the backbone was increasingly used for tower backhaul and such // internal use. Eg a cell tower in 2004 could be serviced by a couple of T1 .. 2010 needed 100 megabit, 2020 at time of merger needed gigabit.
Dude, your research is top notch! Great work!
All of what you said and let's not forget they were known for having absolutely TERRIBLE customer service like this video alluded to. Hundreds of stories of people who tried to take advantage of their "try it or your money back" plan, and when people didnt like their network, they tried to send the phone back only to have it be somehow lost in the mail and charge the customer full price to the tune of hundreds of dollars. No one wanted to go near Sprint after that
I used to work for Sprint for a handful of years. I left right after the merger was approved.
The biggest issues that existed with the network was that it was congested as hell and the company had no money to invest in it. We routinely would report congestion issues and were told to kick rocks. It's absolutely true that if T-Mobile hadn't of bought sprint, Sprint would have gone the bankruptcy route.
Agree. Do you think the Nextel deal was at least one cause? The price tag was pretty high.
I was there back then too. I got out in 19
@@angelachouinard4581 imo the money paid was for the customers, as opposed to the assets. Though I wasn't with the company then so idk for sure. I think it hurt a lot, but had they made the "right" choice with LTE instead of WiMax, they would have been fine. Instead they ended up wasting millions on a technology that ultimately didn't pan out, AND were behind the curve on getting a competitive data network because of it.
I joined soon after WiMax was officially killed and the clear decision by Sprint was just to pump customers into the network. They did eventually begin improving the network but between poor network performance, poor network coverage, and a switch to awful customer service, Sprint killed itself
Ironically, both the Sprint network and the T-Mobile network in my area are terribly over capacity thanks to cheap phone plans marketed at lower income customers who mostly occupy large swaths of apartments, all clustered together. Merging did nothing except put all those customers on the already bad T-Mobile network. Meanwhile, they cannot build any more towers because the wealthy land owners in the area right next to the apartments deeply resent the lower income part of town and refuse to do anything to make life better for the poor folks. The wealthy people are all on Verizon or AT&T and have no issues. It's amazing how class warfare impacts cell service.
I also worked for Nextel (and then Sprint)... but I was an AT&T customer the whole time.
I had sprint from 2013-2020. One thing that wasn’t mentioned was Sprint’s Open World program. It allowed you to use your phone in 100+ countries without the hassle of having to buy a new sim. I remember being out on trail three days in a remote part of Iceland and I still had service. It turns out with cell coverage, and with most things in life, your mileage may vary.
Google Fi (my current carrier: full disclosure) has a similar program
Funny considering when I was moving to Vegas from Michigan in 2007, I had literally no service in parts of the Rockies.
@@JL-sm6cg So, you're saying your service crapped out in Vegas.
What was your mileage on the trail? See any hot springs?
You can still do that with t mobile it’s formally called simple global, now it’s known as international roaming and it’s 210+ counties
NOT South Pacific. It was Southern Pacific in California. Southern Pacific installed a microwave network in 1952 to avoid expensive long distance telephone charges. They had excess capacity so they leased capacity to large business and government customers. The name Sprint comes from "SP", Southern Pacific. SP had other spin offs over the years. Sunset magazine was started by Southern Pacific around 1900. They used a baggage car for a darkroom. Sunset was the main passenger train between San Francisco and New Orleans.
Wow…I haven’t been to this channel in awhile. 1.5M + subs! I remember when you started. Congrats
That Nextel merger was a killer. It sucked up so much of their revenue that they barely had money for anything else. To make matters worse, they commonly competed on price, so any increase would go against their positioning. Whatever revenue they made was already spoken for.
Then the failed Clear wire 5g purchase didn't help.
Keep the informative videos coming. Been a long time subscriber and work in the telecom industry, 26 years, so I can relate. It shows how these seemingly bohemith companies are one boneheaded decision or aquisition away from becoming irrelevant. I'm old enough to remember when Sprint PCS hit the market in the mid 90s. I worked at Radio Shack then and we sold a massive amount of their phones. It was the first phone the common person could afford. There was NO CREDIT CHECK, you got THOUSANDS of minutes talk time per month, the phones were inexpensive or free, the network was SUPERIOR in that it was digital, a CDMA network. It was ENCRYPTED. Back then you could evesdrop on people's calls with a police scanner. Not with Sprint because it was digitally encrypted. I could go on. Sprint was hot sh*t when it first hit the market.
Former sprint customer. You'd get signal in one part of town and then no signal for miles and miles. 10/10 would use again
My mother, sister, and myself all worked for Nextel during Sprint acquiring them. Nextel was incredible to work for, with a fantastic culture, services for their employees I've never seen elsewhere (at the call center I worked at, they had a gift/snack/book shop, full service cafeteria that was open all day, dry cleaning (they dropped it off at the gift/snack/book shop), and team building events that were genuinely fun, not cringey. Sprint ruined all of that, and one by one they did away with the jobs we had (I ran the give/snack/book shop, my mother ran the cafeteria, my sister was a customer service rep in the call center). The first thing they did was destroy the fun culture and shatter morale. I don't even think anyone was actually sad to be laid off, just scared about finding another job.
The company that I worked for used Nextel. We loved the walkie talkie feature.
❤
Nextel’s issue was almost entirely technological .. The people that had their phones loved them and the corporate culture was more flexible than sprint ever was.
On the technology .. iden was great for push to talk and to some extent cell phone calls .. the dispatch function was rock solid.
It was also capacity limited because of the inefficiency of the codec and the fact that the industry was going to date, something iden just couldn’t do except for small packets.
Towards the end of iden, they were getting call blocking (all circuits are busy type thing) on even lightly loaded cells
Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised at Nextel culture and systems, coming from the Sprint side. Your billing and customer systems were so easy compared to our own! We really should have switched over to yours.
Good old Nextel Walkie ..
My mom worked in telecommunications throughout the 90s and 2000s. She worked for GTE, AT&T, Cingular, and more. It was a wild time and she has a lot of cool stories.
I question the authenticity of this post as Cingular later became At&t.
And why would that make you "question the authenticity" of her post?
Cingular didn't become At&t until 2006.
@@Trevor_Schindler more importantly your first assumption is “I’m lying about my mom having various odd jobs to impress people in the comments of a CZcams video about a phone company” instead of “she just listed them off the top of her head out of order instead of posting her mom’s resume?”
Lemme put it this way. I was born in 1994. My mom worked in telecom in the 90s and 2000s and changed jobs pretty regularly. Do you think I know every job in order that she had from between the ages of 0 and, like, 8?
@@averyeml chill... Just made an observation. Glad the comment is real. 🖖
She told you, Trevor.
The WiMax debacle was weird. The reason they didn't deploy a LTE solution was because it wasn't ready yet but the spectrum that sprint purchased from the government had to be used by a certain time or be forfeited (if I remember correctly). That's why soon after they had a WiMax and LTE network going at the same time.
They could have deployed just enough of it into their CDMA footprint just to protect their spectrum license. Kind of a shady thing to do when it isnt currently needed but all the companies did that to some degree.
No they ditched WiMAX in favor of LTE because WiMAX was a complete failure especially when carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile were transitioning from GSM to LTE and Verizon was phasing out CDMA for LTE. Only Verizon’s network for 3G was CDMA. LTE is a whole different network standard
My first job after the Air Force in 1979 I worked for Southern Pacific Communications headquartered in Burlingame California. We installed analog multiplex equipment and although it was a fun experience I left them after a year for MCI where I stayed for 28 years. Communications for those three decades was fun and exciting with new innovations at every turn. Loved every minute of it. Regardless of the company...billing and customer service were the weak points. During that time, the consumer got more educated about communications than ever. No company ever expected texting to become what it is! Or...or...for all the communication providers to be purchased by cell phone companies.
I worked for Sprint...1 of the Big down falls for them, was when they bought out Nextel...Sprint bit off much more then they could chew with the acquisition of Nextel...When they tried to tie CDMA with Nextel,it turned into a HUGE barn fire...
Yeah I forgot about that. Also, Clearwire for 4G wimax service. Those two combined were epic fail
I am trying to remember their Nextel deal, I remember they try to push that as a business walkie talkie thing and Nextel was big in Mexico. Maybe sprint thought it was their way into the Mexican market?
Why do you use so many ellipses
I did love that chirp in class.
@prendaloutto Boy do I miss that chirp too..And ALWAYS had GREAT cell service too..And the phones were built like brick houses too!!!
Really good job on this video - as someone who was closer than most to the behind-the-scenes machinations at Sprint, you got a lot of things spot on. Sprint had some really awful leadership. The Nextel acquisition was bungled by their CEO at the time, Gary Forsee. Nextel was great. Sprint took it over and basically destroyed all the good things about it, leading to that massive $30B write down. And *of course* Forsee rode off into the sunset with a giant golden parachute. That was definitely the beginning of the end. The WiMax fiasco was the next 1-2 punch to ensure that Sprint would never again have the money to compete effectively. Their one big bright spot was the amount of spectrum they owned, and even then a lot of people were laughing at Softbank for paying $20B for this train wreck.
Did they ever make money selling to TMobile after? Softbank is one of the more successful equity mgmt company.
Sprint Exec: "Hey, you're supposed to push WiMax!"
Sales: "B-b-but LTE is the new standard and WiMax is awf--"
🤜💥
Sprint Exec: "ANYONE ELSE GOTTA PROBLEM WITH WIMAX??!!"
From what I understand Nextel was amazing for construction workers and people like that that needed rugged stuff that was not completely dependent on cell signal. And I bet Sprint bungling it made a lot of blue collar guys who keep the world running pissed off.
@@M33f3r Nail on the head. I did cellular sales for a third party during that time frame, and after Sprint acquired Nextel all those rugged, practically unbreakable devices that the construction companies loved went away pretty much overnight & were replaced by models that looked the part but felt cheap and plasticy. Then they tried to incorporate the push to talk feature into some Sprint devices and failed miserably through a combination of the system not working consistently and, again, the devices being too cheaply made. It was supremely frustrating, as Sprint paid us a higher commission per line than the other companies, but it just wasn't worth the headache of trying to sell a customer on a device they didn't want & then deal with multiple complaints about Sprint in the weeks & months after.
They just refused to learn.
Neither Forsee of Hesse were worth a damn.
As an economics major who aspires to launch his own business one day this channel is pure gold
I actually worked at Sprint so I've a unique perspective from the inside. It was fun at first, but not much over the years because although my performance was stellar, the management was terrible when it came to advancement. I simply quit. Always be on the lookout for your next job that pays more.
Interesting! I did not know Sprint was an acronym.
I just thought they called themselves Sprint because once you have them for a while, you'll be sprinting to a different carrier.
As someone who was a Sprint customer for almost 20 years. The poor wireless network point was spot on. I live on Long Island NY and the fact that there were dead spots in service here even up until the T-Mobile acquisition is insanity given that this is one of the more densely populated areas of the whole country. I have to say, things were better once T-Mobile bought Sprint out but I still ended up jumping ship a year or so later.
Agreed. I'm near the dead center of Las Vegas and had similar issues. I did call once, and they told me to locate the nearest tower and stand near the window facing it. I told them I'm looking at your tower now.
My jump into the cell phone race was with Sprint. In addition to the regular cellular service, they also had push-to-talk feature on their phones and that was a feature that i really enjoyed with my Sprint connected friends.
Watching this with a smile on my face 😊
I worked for Sprint from November 2000 to August 2020 and I think he really hit the high points. It was certainly a roller coaster ride. Not always the easiest company to work for but a great bunch of people for sure.
I contracted for Sprint from April 97 with a couple of layoffs until basically 17 July 2023 , but then Cogent had got what was left of the Sprint fiber backbone.
Why weren’t those great people ever able to parlay their greatness into even a decent level of customer service, incompetent, apathetic upper management? I love that they named themselves “Sprint”, and yet in every market they were slow AF, priceless.
That’s telecom for ya
@@jtatsiuehe was probably in the technical side, not management, and we’re powerless on that side…
@Piracanto Thanks, and you are correct.
I have spent days and nights installing and turning up equipment so the upper management could look good and yes had problems myself with customer service because it was outsourced.
In the Kansas City area there was the Sprint Campus and the Sprint Center in downtown, they were a huge employer locally and a lot of people I know lost their jobs in this, it was sad to see.
Not just losing jobs, but with a company going bankrupt, loss of retirement nest egg also after of years of acquiring it. Talk about adding insult to injury!
@@enigmawyoming5201 i imagine that most Sprint employees weren't going to get a pension, but I'm curious of employer 401k contributions are safe in a bankruptcy.
I drove for Clark Products back from 04 to 10 and the cafeterias on Metcalf in KC Kansas they'd always talk when are we gonna lose our jobs we can't make anyone happy. It was a mess hope those folks eventually landed on their feet but my company too got swallowed up by someone else so I felt their pain.
The sprint campus in overland park looked cool but by the end was pretty empty. Funny thing is the HQ is 20 miles from me and Sprint had the worst service. TMobile is in factorial, just outside of Seattle and TMobile had the best signal in Seattle area. The sprint center in the power and light district is still going, just renamed
Having worked with some of those people at that campus I'm not sad to see it. Everyone I had to deal with there was toxic as hell.
Great video! Now do one about the “South”(ern) Pacific Railroad :)
My dad had sprint since the late 90s I believe , I got my first sprint phone in 2004 , never thought that they would be erased from existence let alone by t mobile
Former employee here...and Sprint USED TO be amazing (in the mid-90's). They were smart, incredibly wise, doing great, and then they just lost it in the early 2000s. Lost all focus and everything went to hell fast. I sold my stock as fast as I could thank God.
my family were sprint customers for over 20 years, and were grandfathered in on one of their amazing family plans from the early 2000's. we actually had an excellent experience both in the city and out of town, but totally aware that's a rare experience lol. should be noted my parents traveled for work alot, and the international service was really good.
I was on the very first family plan with sprint (my mom's plan). It was so good. We were on the plan until they literally called my mom to apologize and let her know they couldn't do it anymore, that was just a handful of years ago
@@jasonswoger410 yep same with us, with the T-Mobile takeover we got kicked off too.
Same experience here…was on a family plan since I was in early High school with my family. We got pretty good service most of the time and kept that same grandfathered plan until t mobile literally couldn’t do it anymore. I think that was only 2021 maybe or even last year.
I can’t believe I actually forgot about them
Fun fact, the yellow wing part of the logo follows the path of the "pin drop" when Sprint first came on the scene and they're motto was their connection was so clear you could hear a pin drop. Fund an early commercial. A pin drops, and it's path later becomes that yellow wing shape.
I wish a current provider would resurect Nextel's push-to-talk functionality that basically turned your phone into a walkie talkie. That was super useful on remote jobsites when communicating with dispatch.
Apple has it on the Apple Watch, my wife and I use it all the time
Not a national provider, but Southern Linc still has this service in the Southeast. They used to use iDEN like Nextel, but they switched to LTE. The amount of spectrum they have is pretty small, so data is sliwer then the other carriers, but their coverage is amazing. If you lose signal, you're either in a cave, or the end of the world has occurred.
Sprint's big issue was using CDMA and WiMax instead of GSM and LTE. Even Verizon screwed up initially with that but with the 3G shutdown CDMA is now dead.
I worked in the industry in the mid-aughts and there were real debates going on about which was the better format between CDMA and GSM. Reminded me of the HD-DVD vs. BluRay competition going on at the same time. Friends of mine who had Verizon insisted that their network was better than Cingular's.
Curious why that is? What's the difference?
This was along the lines of what I was going to say. Also Verizon and Sprint couldn't be used with most manufacturer unlocked phones because of the network technology.
5G us what it's all about now.
@SimuLord Both too old now 5G with mmWaves are what's most commonly used in countries with good infrastructure.
I remember when sprint had the google voice connection standard and a few other cutting edge features. It was really something i think they were really trying. Something also to note about Nextel Merger is that the spectrum held by Nextel was worth a lot (low band) high building penetration but it did not reach far. Tmobile is in a good position to put all of that spectrum to good use as they are now offering 5G home connections. I would assume it will be leading the charge in the coming years something that Sprint coukd not do. Also i heard that the logo for the last Sprint logo was a pin dropping 📍.
I didn’t even remember that Classic pin drop commercial from the 90s until watching it 😮 classic era
I was a sprint customer for several years before the merger with T-Mobile, remained Sprint until they pushed me over as part of the merger.
Same here. I often had signal when no one else did. Eventually they sent me the T-Mobile sim and I didn't switch over until they started shutting down sprint towers and service got worse and worse.
@@kbdadriftking Well congrats, you're now on a much better service.
@@kbdadriftking Same here. No matter where I lived I never had signal trouble. Since T Mobile forced me onto their network I've had problems galore. I actually had a complete service outage at one point for several days, not my phone I had it checked, they "lost" me. Stupid customer service wanted to call me back on my phone and it turned on and gave me a no service mgs but they didn't seem to understand that.
My experience has been horrible, going into a T-mobile store, they tell me they cannot pull up my account because I am Sprint and refuse to help me. 😢 The phone has a T-Mobile SIM and they are taking my autopay.
@@red5standingby419 yea not in my experience. the only thing keeping me from switching is that its still my parents plan that im on and dont feel like going through the hassle of moving to my own plan and such. I went from consistently having full bars of 4glte everywhere i went in my city or while traveling, able to stream 4k video no problem to now im lucky if i have more than a few bars of anything and am able to stream spotify. i hate tmo so gd much...
As a phone collector/enthusiast, I can say that Sprint had some phenomenal phones back in the day. However, I can confidently say that they would've been my last choice for cell phone service.
If they cared more about their customers when they were around, they could've probably been in a much better position and maybe even still around today.
I switched from a TMobile Walmart plan it was 100 minutes but unlimited data and text for 30. I saw news of a Sprint promotion that just started that day it was called unlimited Kickstart unlimited data text and call for 20$ immediately switched that day thank God because 2 days later sprint ended the week long promotion. T-Mobile bought out sprint so back to TMobile lol and I'm losing autopay discount because I pay with credit card that has cell phone insurance as well so now it's 25$ I can't complain great deal. So I guess I'll always thank sprint for that plan.
As a former employee, they were just sketchy and its no surprise t-mobile took us over
The walkie talkie feature ttp was the best thing about sprint/nextel phones. I miss that so much.
We used it all the time in the factory i worked at.
I live in a state where Sprint was hands down the best carrier for anyone leaving the metropolitan areas. I was a happy customer for 20 years and was sad to see it go, but T-Mobile has been fantastic.
I used to work for Sprint here in MA. There was a trick some sales reps did to make more commission:
At the time, you got paid more for new lines of service than for upgrading existing lines. What they did was added a new line to get the "new line promo", then advised the customer to cancel their existing number through customer service.
The customer was happy for getting the new promo, and the rep got more comission. It was called the Rhode Island Flip-Flop. Many higher ups were booted after HQ found out about this.
Sounds a lot l8ke the "Albany Ham Scam".
This is so true I used to work for sprint and wow we would take advantage of the new line things but T-Mobile stopped it after the merger for the most part
I’m pretty sure this still happens to some extent cause in a recent call with AT&T I was told I needed a new number and a later employee told me the previous employee was pulling shenanigans
Don’t forget about the Sprint phone connect flip flop 😂
Great video
Sprints downfall was the choice to use Wi-max rather than GSM when beginning their build out of a Data network later choosing to side with Verizon in using CDMA for its 3G left them unable to effectively compete during the boom of the emergence of smart devices like the sidekicks and Nokia n800s, etc. By the time they were able to begin building a better & further reaching network using a newer tech at the time called LTE for their 4G network it was too late they didn't have the money needed to overhaul their network gear to increase speeds and coverage. This left them with lots of great spectrum (radio frequencies) but no money to use it. Which made them a great investment for another cell company to be able to use their spectrum to add capacity to their own network
Feels like there should have been at least some mention of the Embarq spin off causing the company some serious trauma. For reference, I was working for Sprint Nextel when the landline division was spun off to make Embarq. We who ended up in Embarq always marvelled at how Sprint Nextel basically crippled itself by letting itself get divided up like it was. And even though Embarq went on to get bought a few times over(Centurylink, Lumen) the parts of the company went on to be a major player in both front and back end telecommunications.
While I never used Sprint, they were a part of my childhood. & was a bit sad to see the brand disappear after it's merger with T-Mobile.
I miss sprint stadium in kansas city
Learn to use apostrophes correctly. It's means it is. Fail.
Yea
@@jkirk1626bro stfu, nobody cares. I bet you’re real fun at parties
One of my first jobs was at a Sprint Call Center. It was one of the worst companies I've ever worked for. I was shocked by how dificult it was to defend the company against complaints or disenrollment requests. The pay was also terrible.
In the late 90s, Sprint was arguably the best carrier in the nation. By the mid 2000s, they seemed to fall in quality of network to Verizon, who still has the best network. But there was a time when everyone wanted a Sprint flip phone, like the Sanyo 8100.
Waiting for the rise fall and rise again video of Company Man
I remember my short time dealing with MCI, Nextel, and Sprint. With my time using Sprint, I couldn’t drop them fast enough since it was so horrible.
I worked for sprint customer service , tech support and account retention from 2006 - 2016 ... Nextel and Wimax I feel killed the brand ... they banked to heavily on those investments and rode the train to long before they admitted it failed ...The HTC Evo was a hit arguably a trend setter hindered by wimax ... also CDMA could not compete with GSM phones that could do both voice and data simultaneously while CDMA was stuck to either ...
I used Sprint for a couple years before the T-Mobile acquisition. They definitely had the worst of the 4 networks, but it worked well enough where I lived and I got on a really well priced plan. After the T-Mobile acquisition, I still have that plan grandfathered indefinitely ($30 unlimited) and now my service is a lot better, so worked out for me in the end haha.
Omg their customer service was abhorrent!!! The issues I've had with them are beyond any other company I've dealt with.
Sprint represents a weird nostalgia for me. The first person in my household to have a cell phone was my dad, a contractor, who every weekday would drive down to a local college over the state border and fix things that frat boys broke. He needed a cheap, reliable, no-bells-or-whistles phone. So he got something through either Boost Mobile or Sprint. And he had that carrier for the better part of two decades, no complaints, since it did what he needed it to, and the phone itself (some kind of Nokia) could handle the construction environment. We’re very much an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kind of family, so I’d say he was satisfied with it till he switched to using smartphones. He uses AT&T like the rest of us now.
Wow amazing video very nice video ❤❤
Sprint was one of my first cell phone carriers in the early 90's. At some point they changed their network and the old phones no longer worked. I received a $50 gift card for a phone that would work on the new network but had moved on to Verizon at that point. I started freelancing for Sprint at their headquarters in Reston, VA in 2000 about 3 months before they downsized from the 7 building campus to move to Kansas as a cost saving measure.
Sprints headquarters has been in Kansas for decades. They built a massive complex in Overland Park Kansas and tried to centralize there. That complex was big enough to require it's own zip code
I work for RadioShack in the late nineties, and we sold both Sprint PCS and cellular one. Sprint made a big deal out of how their network was a proprietary Network and was not the same as cellular. When description was set on cellular networks you had either analog or digital. On analog anyone who'll listen in with the right kind of radio. On digital, the signals were encoded but not actually encrypted. But that on Sprint PCS Network the signals were digital and encrypted and they changed the encryption code however many times per minute or whatever.
When I got a Sprint PCS phone on the employee plan, I always referred to it as a wireless phone instead of a cellular phone because of the way Sprint have made such a big deal out of house Sprint PCS is not cellular.
I remember this. One day my phone was completely cut from service and was told they were switching to digital and getting ready to ditch analog phones. When I told them I needed a phone they told me to just buy one of their many digital phones. Omg I was so pissed.
Being military sprint was the best option. Got great coverages almost anywhere military bases are during a time when all other phone companies had terrible services. Plus being able to deploy and still utilize my phone while everyone else had to get local foreign area SIM cards or whatever I got to continue with my current plan with no interruption.
15 years with Sprint and never had an issue. Not one. Until T-Mobile took over.
This is all I know of Sprint/nextel. Every time I tried to call my friend about 90% of the time I would hear "please hold while the Nextel customer you're trying to reach is located".
I had a Nextel when I was in high school lol the kind that you can put in the clear cases and put all sorts of lights on the inside of it
I could see T-Mobile (the carrier who purchased Sprint) be a "Why They're Successful" video.
The real answer is the failed AT&T merger. T mobile came out a winner just for having merger talks. It was eventually shot down, but AT&T still had to compensate T Mobile for their time. Immediately after, they went in heavy marketing. They tricked many people into believing their services were cheaper and just as good when it reality it was more expensive in some cases with minimal service.
Definitely, I had them for years and they were always great, the service was good and they had a ton of extra perks and freebies. If I didn't have a provider already, they'd be who Id go to
I had Sprint around 2010-2012 and loved it! It was one of the first to offer unlimited data and it was amazing. Always missed it!
I don't get it... they continued to exist after 2012, why did you not use them anymore if you "always missed it"?
@@red5standingby419 i'm going to assume, they meant that's around the time they started with Sprint.
@@red5standingby419was on a family plan. We used to bounce around to different providers based on who had good deals at the time. Wasn’t all up to me lol
PLEASE do a video on the Penske corporate umbrella. Recently started working for them & learned of their DEEPLY storied past, especially the racing department
Bad cell service
Too expensive
Bad customer service
The list goes on
Fun fact, SoftBank is one of the big 3 wireless companies in Japan. I used their service when I lived there. SoftBank is actually a large conglomerate that owns a ton of companies across the world.
Yeah and softbank is mostly an investment firm not necessarily a cell company the invested in many stuff across its history from payments systems, It systems to cellular.
I grew up in rural Michigan and NEXTEL was huge. Other than local wireless carriers (centennial wireless was what I had at one point) that only covered a few counties in my state, they were one of the few that had coverage about everywhere. Once Sprint took over, basically everybody bailed. I did have Sprint for a number of years once I moved out of state, but switched to AT&T because CDMA didn’t work when I traveled internationally.
My first cell phone was a nextel with the chirp "walky-talky" feature that was one cent a minute during certain hours.
2013 was the year that the company I work for had to stop using the Nextel "push to talk" phones to communicate with techs in the field because they went from working great to barely working at all. From that point on we just started calling each other's personal cell phones to communicate. Now I understand why that breakdown happened.
I used to live in North Kansas City as a kid. It seems like everybody had a parent who worked at Sprint. It's wild that they just don't exist anymore
I remember back in like . . .2015 wondering how Sprint was still in business. I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did.
I went to high school in Overland Park, Kansas less than a mile away from the gigantic "Sprint Campus" right around the time it was being built....I used to take girls and park in the parking garages and look at the stars and dream!!! We would talk about how good this campus was for our families and community, how many jobs it would create, and how it would be awesome to work for Sprint when we grew up like a lot of our friends parents!! That was back in 2001....now i am 40 years old and inherited my parents house in the same neighborhood. I am still to this day paying taxes on the building and maintenance of the now T-Mobile Campus which almost nobody works at because there are too many buildings and too much infrastructure for 1 tech company....
I don't know why I thought it was going to be a hanky panky story, slightly disappointed
I was thinking too like go to the parking garage and you know
I work at the campus and it is not the t-mobile campus, there are a dozen companies here and t-mobile only occupies 5-6 buildings of the 15 that are here.
I’ve done a lot of work out there (signage) and it’s now like a ghost town compared to the “hay day”.
I'm nodding my head in agreement. I was a Sprint customer for about 10 years and saw their wireless network come up short. Calls were dropping regularly and they had the worst customer service, which is why I switched.
Sprint was popular early on in the wireless age because they were the first to offer decent unlimited plans as far as data and texting.
They soon throttled that back as soon as smart phones and 3G came into the picture.
We had been with Sprint since 1998. Never had any issues with the service or customer service. Since merged with T-mobile, we still have our plan from Sprint, which doesn't exist in any carriers today, and it serves our needs very well. I guess we fall in that category of customers who actually had a great experience with the Sprint.
I still have my same plan as well
Same, started in 2016 and iv actually had impressive coverage indirectly with Mint now. For the price I'll never complain
So you’re not the one 🎉😂
T mobile brought them lol. It was never a merge 😂
I like T MOBILE ❤ THEY REMIND ME OF THE OLD DAYS OF SPINT BY SERVICE