Sprint investigating iPhone 4S speed issue, unable to replicate it
Not long after Sprint began carrying Apple's best-selling smartphone last month, customers began reporting connection issues and slow speeds. As of Wednesday evening, a support discussion on Sprint's website has received 1,291 replies and more than 240,000 views.
One customer reported seeing speeds three times as fast on the Samsung Epic Touch on 3G as on the iPhone 4S during a test.
Sprint's head of product development Fared Adib told CNET on Wednesday that the company is looking into the complaints.
"We're taking the reports of problems from a small number of customers seriously," he said. "There's nothing of significance to report yet."
Adib acknowledged the issue in hopes of letting customers know that Sprint wasn't ignoring them, but he had little to report in terms of a solution.
"We don't see anything that is easily replicable," he told the publication, adding that the company would move fast once a fix is discovered.
Last week, The Next Web reported details of an alleged internal Sprint email that acknowledged a "confirmed nationwide issue" that Apple and Sprint were working together to fix.
For its part, Apple has its own issues to work on. The company confirmed on Wednesday that a software bug in iOS 5 has been affecting iPhone users and promised a fix would arrive in a few weeks.
Despite the fact that the iPhone has a 40 percent higher subsidy than the industry average, the carrier has said the smartphone is "worth every penny." CEO Dan Hesse has also hinted that the iPhone's high network efficiency helps keep costs down for its unlimited plans.
The carrier has already seen early success with the iPhone. In just four hours, Apple's newest handset smashed the company's previous one-day sales record.
Hesse has indicated in the past that not having the iPhone was the main reason it lost customers. As the third-largest wireless carrier in the U.S., behind only AT&T and Verizon, Sprint is now counting on the iPhone to reverse the heavy subscriber losses it has sustained from its competitors.
23 Comments
I dont think Sprint could change a roll of toilet paper quickly. I am sorry but every one I have known who had Spring has ended up going to another provider. I would bet that they know what the issue is but are not wanting to fix it for financial purposes. How many times have you heard positive things about Sprint in these forums? More negative than positive. My goodness. I honestly see them being bought out or merger by another company.
Something here smells fishy.
Something here smells fishy.
Yeah. Over 80 pages of complaints on the Sprint forums and they are "unable to replicate it".
Messed up.
I'll just say this. With Sprint NOT trying hard enough to find out their problems with the 3G iPhones, makes me not want to become part of their technology experiment again. As a FORMER Sprint customer from about 2 weeks ago (1st day of 4s release I was new), I did not see decent *stresses decent* speeds from Sprint at all after early day 1. The speeds were atrocious. It took me close to 30 seconds just to pull the MLB playoff score on a 'mobile' website. I don't think I got above .6Mbps even in the middle of the night using speed test apps. Everything was slow. Sure, unlimited data is nice, but I need to be able to use the data at a reasonable rate, and--sadly--Sprint just plain sucked at it ... at least in my area.
I'm getting 137ms ping with .83mbps down/1.09mbps up. Is it great? No. But then I look at my unlimited plan and how much I'm paying for it, and I smile.
I'm not watching movies on my phone (at least not streaming ones), but everything I do is pretty snappy. I even tether on a daily basis for e-mail and some browsing at work. No additional charges!