[svlug] Sprint Broadband Considered Harmful Was: DSL Considered Harmful

[Tim Pepper]

I too was a VERY unhappy Sprint BBD customer.

This might be something they can fix though.  I had pretty crummy luck
with the service for the first few months and then it got drastically
worse.  Pretty bad packet loss and bursty speeds went to unworkable
packet loss and basically no throughput.  Depending on who I talked to
at tech support there was either nothing wrong at all as far as they
were concerned or there were known hardware problems in their network.
The person that told me the latter actually gave me an anticipated fix
date and since that day (back in June) my service has been consistently
very good...lower latencies than every before, generally zero packet loss
and at least 1.5Mbps down.  That person also said its something they've
experienced in a number of their markets and are learning to fix.  He was
indicating RF problems, but from my standpoint it looked like routing.
It was always interesting to note that I had consistently good service
between my home LAN and the first hop on the other side of the wireless
link...anything beyond that into Sprint's network choked hard.  If you
see the same definitely complain to them.

Not that I had any better tech support when I had dsl or was running
work T-1's, but periodic/persistent calls to tech support to complain
seem to eventually get results.  I've gotten in the habit of calling and
if I don't get an answer that seems reasonable calling back immediately
a few times, comparing answers from a few techs and then working with
the best tech.  I've even come across tech's with Linux sense!


On Thu, 16 Aug 2001, Greg Steele wrote:

>
> I'd stay the heck away from Sprint's broadband service.
> I'm have their (non) service, and the performance is
> really horrible in the evenings.

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