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May 4, 2009

In the last couple of weeks, Sprint Nextel has been advertising and selling a new $50 unlimited-calling plan sold under its Boost brand.

However, Sprint's dealers and mobile users report widespread problems with the text messaging features on the Boost network, and the issues appear to be mounting.

Sprint's new Boost Mobile plan uses a very different underlying technology than its main network. Nextel users have complained of occasionally delayed text messaging for years, but the network's main selling point has been the walkie-talkie-like "push to talk" capability, used by work crews and emergency responders.

Now the new plan has opened the network to a new category of customers, for whom text messaging is ever more important than the walkie-talkie feature.

Text messages are frequently delayed by hours, in numerous cases reaching their recipients only early the next morning. There's also a few cases where recipients say they never got the message.

Daniel Michael, a firefighter in Salisbury, N.C. says "that negates the point of using the text messaging feature."

Michael and his wife use their cell phones to text their children, but they often get delays of three or four hours.

John Kim, an independent dealer who has a Boost Mobile store in the Dallas area says "there's a huge deficiency in the text messaging and multimedia messaging field." Kim says he warns new mobile users about the problems, and tests the system by sending himself text messages from time to time.

"I got five text messages at 4 o'clock in the morning that I sent myself nine hours before," Kim said.

John Votava, a spokesman for Boost, said the text messaging problems are due to the influx of new customers, and denied that there are long-standing problems with the Nextel network.

John Kim added that he's been signing up an average of about ten to twelve new customers a day on the plan, three or four times the number that came in before the Boost Unlimited plan was introduced in January. However, a lot of them come back, very irritated about the text messaging problems, he said.

"This trend of a lot of people signing up to Boost is going to disappear really quickly if they don't rapidly fix the text messaging issue," Kim said.

Today, wireless industry analysts expect Sprint to report that Boost attracted somewhere around half a million new subscribers in the first quarter, which would be a piece of good news for the company. But the additions from Boost are not expected to outnumber defections from Sprint as a whole.

Votava added "the popularity of Boost Mobile caught us off guard. Sprint has been working day and night to repair the issues, and we aim to have the system much improved by next week."

Despite the texting problems, it seems most Boost subscribers aren't giving up, however. In North Carolina, Michael said mobile (voice) calls and the push-to-talk function have worked very well.

Bryan Scheiber in Grosse Ile, Michigan, signed up for Boost Unlimited in February, and has been mostly happy with it. The call quality is better than on his previous carrier, AT&T, he said. Like many, he's also woken up a few times to find some text messages that were sent to him the previous day.

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Source: LNR.