Coverage Issues
Sprint and Nextel retained their place even after receiving tough competition in the market. Most of the providers support LTE but Sprint still stays with WiMAX. In spite of maintaining the network periodically, their subscribers complain about the coverage issues.
To catch-up the market and provide good network coverage Sprint used Femtocells, which would fix the poor reception complaints. But, as the number of bandwidth users increased, the issues with the reception started popping again. To fix this issue, Sprint started distributing Airave devices for home broadband users. This device helped the customer to connect to the nearest Sprint’s cell, thereby improving the reception quality and signal strength automatically, even in extreme bad coverage areas.
After launching 3G, Sprint marketed the sweet plans and packages. The network showed congestion once again so, the introduced the advanced version of Airave devices that helped improving the signal strength even inside the building. For the dead coverage areas, this device was given to the customers without even demanding, but later it became a part of the package.
Although, the Sprint CDMA coverage is slightly better but, most of the parts in Alaska and Montana face coverage issues. Since Nextel’s iDEN network is not widespread in these regions, the situation for Sprint has become even difficult. After the launch of 4G service, Sprint might put efforts to strengthen their coverage in these areas.
Since the plans being offered by Sprint are less expensive and customers are getting the popular Smartphones along with their service, the coverage issues should not be neglected.
