Can someone give me a thumbnail on how to compare Cingular to Sprint? I have had Sprint for seven years or so but I am sick of

a) terrible (and I mean terrible) customer service
b) poor cellular service in unpredictable places
c) phones lag the rest of the industry in feature and design

I travel nationwide so coverage is important. Price is not that big a deal if I can keep a two line plan for less than $100 inclusive of tax, which is the company limit for reimbursement. I currently have 2000 (shared) anytime mins plus unlimited nights and weekends for $85, including a company discount. Pretty good deal but I think I can do nearly as well, as my company has a discount with Cingular as well.

Any suggestions on how to make the decision? I really dig the RAZR phone.

I am a former Cingular user and present Sprint user. I travel to Europe and Asia a lot, so I am tempted to switch to a GSM carrier. The reasons that I don't:
1) Sprint has excellent service in most of the places where I work and live (SF Bay Area)
2)Sprint has excellent coverage in the major metro areas of the US where I travel
3)I actually think CDMA technology is better than GSM and that Sprint has pretty cool phones. The Sanyo and Samsung phones are pretty good and check out some of the stuff being sold in China for CDMA
4)I have a great retention plan where I get all the minutes I need for 50/month
5)While I have heard horror stories about Sprint cust service, I have always had good luck. If I do get someone that is not helping me, I just hang up and try again. I have also played the "Cancel service" card a few times. This usually gets you to a higher level of agent.

If I were shopping for a carrier, the main thing I would consider is signal strength in the places where I use my phone. If you are considering Cingular, see if you can borrow someone's phone for an hour or more and test it out in your commute, in your house and office (or wherever you use it most). Also, talk to people in your office or neighborhood.

I firmly believe that all of the carriers "suck" in one way or another (price/service/signal), so you have to find the one that "sucks" the least for you and your needs. Hope this helps.

FDuvall

I have been with sprint for years under a corporate discount (about the only thing keeping me there). As long as I never have to talk to their customer service people, I have been happy.

Recently, a friend of mine suggested I get the hot new phone, the S710a from Sony Ericsson, whch required I sign up with Cingular where another corporate contract made the cost and rates attractive.

Now, I mention corporate contracts because one would assume ( ) that when the customer service person sees your account tagged as a 'national account' from a major customer, they would go out of their way to help you - not so.

I had issues with Sprint that had to be escalated to the Florida Dept of Consumer Services before I got anywhere...and every question I asked Cingular was answered with a "no". It got so frustrating, I decided to chuck Cingular out the window, send back the phone and stick with Sprint until Sony releases their update to the P910, at which time I will switch to whoever will support that phone.

The bottom line: they are both bad from a customer support perspective. I think Sprint offers better coverage and voice clarity, but Cingular offers some neater phones. Verizon offers the best coverage and customer support, but their phone selection is abyssimal.

I was an AT&T customer (then cingular, and my wife has been on sprint, so I can do some side by side for you.

I too was Sprint, but in my few blocks of Manhattan they had no coverage, so I had to switch to something else.

Coverage - Both have their issues, there are places Sprint had a bad signal, and places Cingular had a bad signal. I wouldn't consider one better then the other.

Phones - I need to make and receive calls, so that's not an issue.

Customer Service - Whatever service you have at Sprint, it's going to be light years ahead of Cingular. They are the worst example of customer service on the planet I've seen in a very long time (you can tell I'm not happy with them).

Billing - We never had an issue with sprint at all. Cingular, for whatever reason, decided a few months ago to bill me for two calls just over six hours each, made at exactly the same time, and I'm still fighting to get that resolved. They refuse to work it out, and until I went to the BBB with it other state and federal agencies, all they did was to tell em to pay up or off to collection it goes.

I moved to a prepaid with tmobile, it's saving me a ton of money for my calling patterns, and it's been great.

I thought there could be no poorer customer service than at Sprint, but I see that others have their horror stories about Cingular as well.

My experience with Cingular has been OK - sometimes good and never terrible. I was with ATT before and noticed that their customer service went through bad and worse patches.

My son broke his phone, and wife thought hers was broken (the settings had somehow magically re-set themselves, probably banging around in her purse).

Since I was with ATT, I could not upgrade phones without a new contract from Cingular. And they could not match the 4 line plan we have. But the fellow on the phone did some work arounds and we ended up with two very cheap Motorola replacements and kept the same plan. I have had other experiences when they have gone out of their way.

I use Sprint and the only problem I've had is the slow delivery of voice mail. Sometimes I don't get a notice that a voice mail has been left for me for many hours after its left.

I've been on three business trips in the past few months where people with Sprint had no service. I have the old AT&T one-rate plan (don't know if Cingular still offers it) that lets me log onto any cell service with no roaming cost. A number of times I've been the only person around me who could get service; it's been a life saver.

Folks,Cingular customer service is a crap shoot and all depends on the call center handling you and which 'legacy' carrier it was a part of. Folks on the Cingular 'Blue' network (former AT&T), I feel for you. You're going to have HORRID Customer Service until they clean AT&T up which is taking forever. The folks you talk to will be nice but they won't be able to do much to help and won't know much about what's going on.

Former SNET customers in CT? Not a clue what service is like. Same for Comcast customers. Former Bellsouth areas (FL, GA, SC, LA) should be decent for customer service and SBC areas will have good customer service (TX, OK, AR, KS, IL)... unsure about CA and the west, no experience. But, yes, until Cingular fully knits everything together and applies uniform standards you're looking at some differences depending on where you live if you go Cingular.

For my part, Cingular customer service is lightyears beyond Sprint, T-Mobile, or anyone else for that matter. I have had great luck with 'em and if I get someone unhelpful, I ask for a supervisor who addresses the problem.

I've had Cingular since their inception. Before that, it was BellSouth Mobility. My service goes back 17+ years. Since it's been Cingular (how long? I don't remember) I've experienced great customer service, great technical support. In the past 7 or 8 years, I can only remember one rural area where I could not get a signal. Granted, I don't leave the country, but, when I'm out in the boondocks, a phone is my lifeline. Whenever one phone wears out or becomes obsolete, the company upgrades me to a new one for little or no money. I don't, however, require every new bell and whistle on it. I just want to make and receive calls and take pictures every now and then. I do experience a dropped call every now and then but I suspect that happens with every carrier. Under the current circumstances, I wouldn't dream of switching from Cingular.

Because of network coverage differences, I've had to use Sprint too. Cingular's customer service is certainly better than Sprint's. (Don't get me started on Sprint's store staff in DC.)

What I do now is use a Vonage-hosted phone number as my cellphone number and forward it to either of my cell phones (or elsewhere). It lowered the number of minutes I use and avoids my need of checking on my other cell phone's voicemail when I get lazy or something.

Cellular One/Cingular STILL hasn't done anything with their Balto/Wash network? HOLY SH!T! I was a student at GWU in 1991 and back then they were absolutely positively the WORST carrier in DC. BAMS was the only way to go and the pricing reflected it, they were easily 1.5x the cost of C-1 AND had a smaller coverage area!

What I really miss is Sprint Spectrum/APC. They had good customer care, the best network (at that time) in the DC area, decent retail locations and the pricing wasn't extortionate. When APC sold out to Sprint PCS that was the end. I thought Voicestream/T-mobile got all the network equipment in that transition but in recent trips to DC the network seems quite inferior to what APC had.

Have you tried Verizon? No recent experience but they had an excellent network and good customer service even way back when.

The first and only phone that I've ever had has been sprintPCS (5+ years). I have heard several people complain about everyone's customer service, so I just don't pay attention. I never have had a problem with sprint's CS mainly because I never have a reason to run into them so often. I went with Sprint, like others, for the coverage. I lived 1k miles from where I went to school and traveled alot while in college. It was perfect for me. I worked for sprint a couple of years later for a summer job and saw how loyal cutomers had a slight leverage with rules.

I really don't know what new advatages that cellular companies are offering now, since there have been so many mergers. Before, sprint wasn't any good for customers in rural areas, just urban locations. Since I haven't been in that travel area, I don't worry about it either. So in the end, Sprint is A+ with me.

I haven't tried Verizon myself, but my buddies who have it seem to stick with it. Cingular has improved in DC (a bit), but its coverage nationwide seems to cause me more trouble than Sprint's network, which is improving even as its customer service has slipped.

Not true. I've had great customer service the few times I've called.