El Paso Sprint customers complain about poor signal

Having trouble with your cell phone signal?

Sprint has been receiving a lot of complaints from its customers about issues around El Paso, especially over the past several days Downtown. A frustrated ABC-7’s Darren Hunt, who uses a Sprint phone, looked into the situation Wednesday and had no trouble finding several Sprint customers with signal issues.

“Sometimes, people call me and it goes right to voicemail,” said UTEP student Laura Perez.

“My friend works Downtown and Sprint doesn’t work there,” said El Pasoan Armando Perez.

“On my phone, it just won’t kick in!” said an upset Bruce Belcher, who lives near Downtown. “When I want to make phone calls out of it, I couldn’t make no phone calls out. And then when I call the company they tell me, well, they’re looking into the situation.”

Belcher has been a Sprint customer for several years.

“They ain’t been working for eight days,” Belcher added. “I started to throw the thing across the room. I got so mad because i couldn’t get no contact or anything. I called em about seven times. I said, ‘What would happen if i really needed it in an emergency?'”

For four hours on Tuesday, ABC-7’s Darren Hunt found myself without any Sprint cell phone reception while covering the City Council meeting at the Downtown El Paso library. However, on Wednesday, he had a full signal.

“They finally fixed it,” Belcher said. “It works now.”

ABC-7 contacted Jennifer Schuler, Sprint’s Texas Manager of Corporate Communications on Wednesday.

“As we were working on wiring connection issues in East El Paso, we found some things going on Downtown as well,” Schuler said. “That was fixed on Tuesday. Downtown is ok now.”

Schuler added: “We also have a big effort underway called ‘Network Vision,’ putting in an all new 4G network and expanding the existing 3G footprint of all of our sites. We plan to have that largely completed by the end of the year.”

Because of that, Schuler said Sprint’s signal, which has been spotty in places around town and not just Downtown, should be much improved in El Paso in the future.

ABC-7 also spoke with El Pasoans Wednesday who said they have had repeated issues with their Sprint cell phone signal on the UTEP campus, in East El Paso and near the Franklin mountains in Northeast El Paso.