Here's Sprints guiding "philosophy", you may find it very similar to that of one Mack Brown: "Fuck you, pay me."
First, why would they buy out T-Mobile, but keep their name?
That's easy. Because Sprint had completely trashed their name by the time they bought T-Mobile. So they keep the name, and voila, the emperor has new clothes.
Now, back before sprint bought out Nextel, and really before Nextel was a big deal or was just becoming a big deal, sprint just loved to fuck people over. One such example revolves around day/night minutes. Remember those? Remember how they worked? 7a-7p: daytime minutes, which you had a limited amount of; 7p-7a: nighttime minutes, which at the time were "unlimited." The kicker here is that if you were on a call before 7a, it was nighttime minutes, and would remain nighttime minutes until the call was completed. Even if that call went beyond 7a.
So at the time, I was driving back and forth about 75min for work. I'd leave just a bit after 6, and about 6:20 I'd call up a buddy of mine and we'd chat during our commutes. We'd both arrive about the same time to work, about 7:25-7:30. Ok, no big deal, right? Take advantage of those nighttime minutes, right? Even if it's only 30 minutes, right? At the time that savings made a difference.
Now the fun part. I started noticing our call dropped every morning. I altered my routine just enough to see if a different tower would make a difference. It did not. So I called Sprint to see if there was an issue, or at least let them know there might be one. No big deal right? Yeah, they didn't give a single fuck. So for 6 months, every morning, and the occasional Saturday morning, I documented every single call. When it started, when it dropped, and where I was at the time. From time to time I left earlier/later enough to be on a different tower. Nothing made a difference, and by 7:03 in the morning, the call would drop. However, it never dropped on a Saturday morning.
Once again, I presented Sprint with the data. Fucks given? Zero.
So what was really happening there? What was the issue? The issue is they were intentionally cycling their towers to drop existing nighttime minute calls. Pretty sleazy.
We won't even get into their billing "discrepancies", either.
So for me, that was enough to drop their service. I moved to Nextel, and never had another issue. Well, until sprint bought them out, and guess what? Within 3 months it was back to the same bullshit. Dropping calls when minutes changed, major billing issues, the works.
Dropped them and never looked back. If they were the only carrier left, I'd do without.