Kyocera DuraXT / DuraPro

Luck of the draw, I guess.

Several of my relatives have Sprint, and traveling in New England my Nextels have delivered better performance overall than their CDMA Sprint phones. Same thing when I tried a Sprint CDMA phone for a 30-day trial a few years ago, right alongside my Nextel phone throughout southern CA, and the Sprint phone's performance was NOT as good as the Nestel's, so I turned in the CDMA phone at the end of the trial. Verizon is better than Sprint in terms of network quality & coverage, and yet there are places when my Nextels have had coverage but not the spouse's Verizon. I have personally carried AT&T and T-Mobile at the same time I've been carrying my Nextel, and without one iota of doubt, the Nextels delivered vastly better performance in far more places than either AT&T or T-Mobile (a few years ago). Of course, there are places where I and/or family and./or coworkers have been together where Nextel did not have coverage while their Verizon or ATT phones did.

In a nutshell, the ONLY thing that matters is how well a given carrier & phone perform for a given individual in the places they frequent. Anyone can build a case both for & against every carrier in the US, depending on where they take their sample data.

My point is, despite Sprint's constant crowing that their CDMA network will cover 3X what iDEN did, for me in my world, Nextel has performed better overall than Sprint, ATT or T-Moblle, and that is all that matters to me. I admit that Verizon is the king of the hill in the US in terms of network performance & coverage, but their phones and their lack of a decent PTT system knocks them out of the running for me personally.

And don't forget, every single bit of improved coverage area, in-building penetration, and high-bandwith frequency across the US that the Sprint CDMA customers are beginning to enjoy, is coming courtesy of all the network holdings that Nextel brought to the marriage. So many people complain that Nextel is bringing Sprint down, and by some metrics that is true, but overall Sprint's future has been assured only by virtue of the spectrum holdings that came courtesy of Nextel.