Sprint plans a new wireless network, but has its skeptics

[proud2BlibKansan]

By JASON GERTZEN and DAVID HAYES
The Kansas City Star

Picture it.

You’re on Interstate 70 headed for Denver and the kids are in the back seat with a laptop, watching a movie streaming in from Netflix or Movielink.

Send it.

You’re at your daughter’s first-grade play with the ubiquitous video camera. But instead of just taping the show, you’re beaming a live broadcast to your parents’ television set in Florida.

Browse it.

You’re sitting across the desk from the car salesman, using your new Samsung Ultra Mobile computer to hit Edmunds.com and Consumer Reports.com to find the dealer’s invoice price for a new Chevrolet Malibu.

It may sound a little like the imaginings of Arthur C. Clarke or H.G. Wells. But for Sprint Nextel, it’s a multibillion-dollar manuscript that almost certainly will determine the future of the area’s largest corporate employer.

Sprint Nextel is betting up to $5 billion that it can build a whole new kind of business delivering high-speed wireless Internet access to homes, businesses and even vehicles.

more . . .
http://www.kansascity.com/105/story/276913.html

[hedgehog]

1. I'd be happy if Sprint would eliminate the dead zones that lie

in scattered patches 10 miles around my house!

[progressive_realist]

3. Or make their phones work inside apartment buildings

You might be able to do all these nifty things elsewhere, but can you use their phones when you are at home? I switched from Sprint to T-Mobile because I could never get a signal if I was in a lower story of a multistory building. Since my apartment is on the second floor and my office is on the ground floor, that meant I couldn't receive calls for approximately 20 of every 24 hours.

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. My whole house is a Sprint dead zone

And I live 5 miles from their world headquarters.

[sandnsea]

2. grandma is in a nursing home

A video can be accessed via internet or wireless, any time of the day. Any takers for that business plan?

[Kansas Wyatt]

5. Sprint - Nextel cannot even provide coverage in the KC Metro.

Seems they would be more worried about why they can't cover their own damn headquarters.

[proud2BlibKansan]

6. Bingo

They even laugh about the poor coverage at the Sprint campus and blame it on so many people trying to access the network at once. I have a friend who works at the campus and if I called her on her cell at work, the call almost always dropped. I used to have Sprint and when I called my neighbor who also had Sprint, that call dropped nearly every time. Now I have a different carrier and I can call both of these people and the call doesn't drop. Interesting, eh?