[darkhelmet]

For people like me that hate when folks post acronyms without the courtesy of explaining what it is and just in case another non-techie reads the article and wonders WTF you are posting about. All in all it's a pretty prevalent and discourteous practice and makes posts like this almost worthless.

PRL (Preferred Roaming List)

This list tells your phone which towers to look for when establishing connection, including towers from other carriers that Sprint has roaming agreements with. As new EVDO towers are installed or new roaming agreements are reached, your PRL will become out of date because it won't know to hunt for these new towers. You may be in an EVDO area, but if your phone does not have the tower in the list, it will not know to attempt to connect to the new tower.