The first phone was labeled 4G and second one was 4G LTE, which sprint didn't have in my area. I had been using wimax.
I switched to Verizon not too long after that so I could have 4G again
All of them - all the CW sites, were under provisioned for backhaul.
I think both of us can be right at the same time though. Just because they had problems before the SoftBank acquisition as well doesn't necessarily make what I'm saying unreasonable. There was still sentiment in 2013 when SB closed the deal that regulators would not have approved of Sprint acquiring T Mobile [0], despite the struggles going on at Sprint at the time (that you describe). Sprint was definitely putting together a bid to acquire T Mobile, WSJ reported on it [1].
As you yourself said, Sprint was _dying_ at the time of the SB acquisition, but as far as large firms go, they were far from bankrupt yet. SoftBank simply twisted the dagger and then presented the corpse to congress instead of the dying patient.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/4/5376824/fcc-chief-reported...
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303293604579256...
I cannot explain how poorly managed Sprint was, it'd take me an essay to just explain the various dysfunctions I saw there.
That said, it did improve some once Softbank bought them.
I also saw at least half a dozen sites, cut and in service still sitting on their pallets, such a mess.
Imagine for a moment you go off to the crusades, leave the barn to one group, the fields to another group, and leave the house to a third group, then gleave no one in charge and give them no way to communicate beyond the most informal means - and you're surprised everything is on fire upon your return?
In the end it did work once it was done, but it was only hell for the customer during deployment because it was deployed and cut in a hopscotch fashion, which would be fine, if you could roam from new back to old - there was a one way roam, from old to new, once on new, there was no path to roam back.
Sprint was dying - with extraordinarily high debt, in 2007, well before Softbank bought them, and indeed they lost money every year from 2008 forward - https://www.statista.com/statistics/481739/sprint-corporatio...
The Merger with Nextel managed to kill what was great about Nextel, and what was good about Sprint, and they lost customers in droves (mostly former Nextel ones). In reality Sprint bought Nextel's OAM equipment and their customers, and moved all the legacy Sprint customers onto the surviving billing and network management platforms (Nextel). The iDEN turndown also lost even more customers, most of whom who realized they didnt need PTToC after all (which is too bad, because on dedicated CDMA hardware, it worked really great).
Then they needed to start rolling out LTE (Network Vision) - and NV didnt start in earnest until 2012/13 - and as someone who was on the field end of it, was very very very poorly managed. Sprint some years prior had outsourced all their engineering expertise to Ericsson, which means they had no one in house with any knowledge. They only realized that 18 months in, and then scrambled to get people back from Ericsson (who I will note, they did not contract any of the deployment management to).
I only know this because I was in the middle of the deployment as a field resource in Seattle.
My guess is only half the sites in the network (in Seattle Market) had enough customers to pay their fixed costs.
I concluded while I worked there that there was no way for four carriers to be viable, there isnt enough spectrum allocated, and you pay the same fixed costs over and over again.
I'll go further, Sprint had a massive switch facility for the LD operations with room for like 4 DMS250's in Tacoma, but that's not where they put the SPCS 5ESS, that was in Kirkland in a rented building (and interestingly enough, it's still part of T-Mobiles operations today), there was also another Motorola iDEN switch also in Kirkland.
Post merger they never really made any effort to reduce their fixed costs (sites, switching centers, et al), because that would have cost money - they also got bled dry by having to foot the entire bill for rebanding the SMR band, which was on the order of 2.5 billion dollars. They did close stores (and RS was a major outlet for Sprint Sales, before it went belly up) which contributed to problems later.
So I don't know where you got your info, but I think its hooey - before Softbank bought Sprint, they didn't have the capital to upgrade their 2G/3G network to LTE, much less consider a merger with T-Mobile.