It appears that several blogs and online publications are picking up my story about how Sprint Nextel gouged me for around $50,000.00. Stacey Higginbothom over at gigaom so eloquently states the story (In the Red? Sprint Says Gouge the Customer) that I am almost jealous of her writing skills (kudos to Stacey).

Valleyrag, err I mean Valleywag also picked up Stacey stories, however the information they posted wasn't quite correct. Sprint Charging 300 Percent Premium on T1's.

From the gigaom article comments

"So it’s OK for Sprint to stretch the truth, lie, and charge you too much for something because you expect people to do “due diligence” to figure out Sprint is ripping them off? 
 

This is a reason why I am no longer a Sprint customer and lots of other people have moved on to other companies leaving Sprint with some pretty bad churn issues: if you have to do “due diligence” on a major firm like Sprint to catch lies, mistatements, misrepresentations, etc. then they shouldn’t be in business which is the direction they’ve been headed in for some time now. Honest companies keep customers. So if Sprint isn’t honest, it’s the customers fault for not doing “due diligence”. Now Sprint must pay the piper since they aren’t honest and too many people have figured it out." - gigaom

I like to use an electric company analogy. When I pay my electric bill I don’t have to worry about it as I am paying the current rate, and so is every customer that uses the same electric company. We don’t discover down the road that we are paying more per kilowatt than our neighbors. What the problem is they (SPRINT) has gotten away with it for so long that it has become standard operating procedure to stick it the customer and leave it up the to the customer to catch them. Perhaps there needs to be even further regulation of the industry to ensure that gouging doesn’t happen.

The reason why the electric company (local cable, local phone companies, etc.) doesn’t charge one customer and another customer something different is because all the customers are local (regional, etc.) and can talk to each other and compare notes if you will. Dedicated access companies such as Sprint has customers that are spread out and I am guessing that Sprint is taking advantage of the fact that these customers aren’t close enough to discuss services, therefore their is less scrutiny of it’s pricing. Well I aim to keep the cat out of the bag and perhaps help other current and potential customers from getting the bad end of the stick like I did with Sprint.

Due diligence shouldn’t fall on the customer, but on the company itself. Sprints sales reps lied to me 4 or 5 times about the cost when I asked about it, and actually told me the price would go up if I signed another agreement (thank God I didn’t ever sign another and went month to month). Agreed, I should have followed up on this a lot earlier, the fact of the matter I didn’t, however that doesn’t give Sprint the right to screw me long and hard.

Thanks everyone for helping bring light to Sprint's dishonest business practices and their lying sales representatives. Keep up the great work!

Read the full, unadulterated story about Sprint at www.sprint-really-sucks.com, it quite a good read (also a MP3 audio of a call to Sprint and catching them lying).

Allen

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