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My experience with Sprint - if, and that's a big IF, you can get your plan set up right.... and you never touch it, and they don't migrate you to a new billing system, OR you catch billing errors right away (look for a billing error any, er, EVERY time you touch your account!) then they're fine. Basically, if you can get it right two months in a row, you're good to go until the next screwup.
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I about fell off my chair laughing when reading this. It perfectly sums up my experience with both Sprint and Embarq(Sprints Local service branch). I've had to argue with Sprint for a year before they could get my home phone billing correct when they later talked me into their 'combined' plan it took another year to fix it.
After they created the Embarq brand to sell local service under they started offering cellular service (Sprint labeled as Embarq), so the wife and I got new phones through them. What a nightmare! My wife got a simple LG unit and I got the PPC-6700. First they switched the phone numbers when transferring service, so I had to go 2-3 days giving everyone three different numbers to try and call to get me, before they got it fixed.
Then after a week of talking to every idiot that works in Sprint tech support (I don't think they are all idiots, just most I have talked too) about why I could not get a data connection, I finally got in touch with a very nice and helpful lady. Who spent about 2 hours on the phone with me only to find out that they had burned the wrong firmware to the phone. As I was leaving town for the week on business they said they would ship the replacement phone to my hotel room and that it would arrive Monday when I got to the hotel, yeah right.
So, the replacement arrives the next Friday, and everything seems to work OK. I got the next bill and about fell over. They not only charged me for the replacement phone, but they were nice enough to charge me full price! It took close to 2.5 months to get the second phone off the bill, meanwhile the keyboard started falling apart (within two weeks, and I did notify them). I refused to go through another round of replacement until they got the first billing error fixed. After the billing error was fixed I called back and asked about getting a replacement. The two 'ladies' I talked to were horrible, absolutely the worst customer service I have ever had. They tried to refuse to do anything and then the 'supervisor' tried extortion tactics, saying she would only issue a replacement if I agreed to buy insurance. As the issue had nothing to do with having or not having insurance, and they were notified when this second phone failed (these two ladies had the information from when I had called before), I flatly refused to have to pay them even more money for an item that had never worked right from the get-go.
So, many more hours spent on the phone, complaints filed with the BBB, I had to lean on a really nice lady who works for Embarq locally (who was great to deal with, she really tried to help even though it was not her job), to get another phone sent. The third PPC-6700 worked right out of the box, it took another 3-4 months before they quit screwing up the bill. (If you can think of a possible way to screw up a bill they did it.)
What really gets me is that this type of nonsense has to cost them a bundle. The billing errors simply should not happen, it costs the company too much money. Not to mention it drives customers away. But perhaps I was being too demanding by expecting to have both a working phone and a correct bill?