Cell Phone Information
Oregon and the Pacific Northwest
Last Update: 8/2017
News & Tips
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August 2017: Sprint Roaming: Historically, Sprint was a real leader in coverage through very inclusive roaming. Years ago, they introduced a $5/mo option called Free and Clear America. What was novel about at that at the time was that Sprint roamed on virtually everyone. Back in the day, a Sprint phone could roam on Verizon, ATT, and US Cellular here in Oregon. They used the then common standard of analog cellular to permit this. Over time Sprint's roaming has become more limited. At first limiting minutes, text and data used when roaming. In recent time, they've made it very difficult to roam at all. Our Sprint iPhone 6 used to easily roam on Verizon whenever the native Sprint signal was weak. Now, the phone will often cling to a weak and unusable Sprint signal instead of roaming. Gone are the days when Sprint phones even had a manual menu option to select roaming. For folks like me the roaming permitted seasonal (really summer) travel without hiccups. Our Sprint phone fared nearly as well as Verizon and for less money. I simply mean that when Sprint's native signal was unavailable, the phone would seamlessly roam on Verizon or whatever compatible carrier was available. From the carrier's point of view, this roaming is costly. They pay the carrier you roam on even if that roaming is included in your plan. So roaming is generally and understandably limited.
I think the thing Sprint is missing with current phone programming is that there are folks (like me) who don't mind data essentially being in-op, if we can at least make voice calls and text messages reliably while roaming. With the current Sprint programming, their phones seem to avoid roaming to the extreme (even depriving one from basic voice or text roaming) including in areas where this use to work fine. So as cost controls go, this one has been very "user-visible" and although I'd guess some of our folks using Sprint lack the ability to describe specifically what is wrong, they do notice that their phone simply doesn't work as well as it used to.
If your curious, CDMA providers use something called an enforcible PRL (preferred roaming list) which includes region based roaming rules. The PRL has the ability to lock roaming out altogether or to severely limit roaming (which is what Sprint has done). If the phone is aggressively set to search for the Sprint native signal, it also kills the battery quickly when in areas where only roaming is possible. I recenty spent a few days in one of these situations and the phone would go 2-3 minutes with no service and then "under duress" briefly roam to Verizon, and back to no service for a couple or a few minutes. In short, their new roaming settings are so aggressive as to render roaming in many locations in Oregon unusable. This, all in an area where roaming used to work reliably and seamlessly.
Since the smaller carriers (Sprint and T-Mobile) don't have nearly the size of geographic coverage as the "big two" (ATT and Verizon), they both benefit from roaming to make their effective coverage areas much larger. They don't always roam on ATT and Verizon of course, and in fact often prefer any alternate roaming partner that is available (presumably due to better roaming rates). T-Mobile's roaming for data is limited to 200Mb. They also don't permit roaming everywhere their primary Oregon roaming partner (ATT) has coverage. So both number 3 and 4 now have some pretty restrictive roaming policies. Ideally, these smaller carriers will build out their native footprint so they simply don't have to rely on roaming. I would also note that both ATT and Verizon's promotional plans are very competitive lately, so if you live in a place where either of them work well, perhaps just skip the "value carriers."
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