July 9th, 2007
Sprint Tries to Cancel Soldiers’ Accounts … Because of Excessive Roaming
By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews
You may recall my earlier post, in which it was noted that Sprint was cancelling what they considered to be high-maintenance customers, as a group, effective July 30th (don’t worry, if it was going to happen you would have a letter by now). Turns out they are also cancelling customers who roam too frequently … and that includes about 200 soldiers.
The struggling carrier was exposed last week for attempting to get rid of accounts that it claimed were calling its customer service lines too frequently. An undisclosed number of customers were told their service will be cancelled on July 30.
However, it now appears another group of people are being told their Sprint service will be dropped on that day — those who frequently roam outside the company’s own network. About 200 of these happen to be U.S. Army soldiers, according to a post to SprintUsers.com. Source: BetaNews
We Say: These soldiers had redeployed to West Point to assist in training cadets. Fortunately, if you look at the end of the SprintUsers.com thread (linked above), it appears that this may be already be resolved, and that Sprint has a general policy which would enable these soldiers, once they informed customer service (oops, they’d have to call, hope that’s not held against them! 
) to keep service … although it appears from a later post there may be a loophole which would allow Sprint to carry out this step. But I doubt, now that the media has heard about this, that anything like that would happen.
Sprint tells soldiers to go shove it: Cell plans canceled for “excessive roaming” - GEARFUSE says:
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July 9th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
Gadget News » Sprint tells soldiers to go shove it: Cell plans canceled for “excessive roaming” says:
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July 9th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Freud says:
When I went to my son’s graduation from boot camp one of the things I noticed was the highly visible presence of Sprint on base. When these men and women are going through boot camp they get a shot at an extremely short phone call on Sunday’s. Their only other communication is through the U.S. Mail (and that service is horrible, by the way. The Postal service should be embarrassed at the service they provide to these men and women.)
After graduation, these young service members RAN to get cell phones so they could call anyone and everyone that meant something to them.
Sprint made a lot of money that day. They had to have gone through a lot of effort to get their kiosks in the right places to attract the soldiers. For them to cut service on a few who end up roaming (and west point is shown on Sprint’s site as NOT being a roaming location) is really a sign of the poor customer service that they have become famous for.
Perhaps it is time for the military to negotiate preferred provider contracts with a single company willing to guarantee quality service to service members. Big business does this all the time. I’ll bet The US Army would have a bigger $ value in sales than GM, GE or Toyota, for that matter.
July 10th, 2007 at 1:02 am
Robert Ervin says:
Just heard about this; shock, disbelief. Why hasn’t it reached main stream media?
October 5th, 2007 at 1:05 pm