Switching to Sprint
In the name of “research”, I recently decided to switch my local phone
service to Sprint from Bell. It was a relatively pain-free experience with
only a few technical glitches. That said, I can inderstand why Sprint has
its hands full to convince consumers to come on over. The first challenge is
comfort/laziness. Why switch when Bell's service is good and prices seem
reasonable? There is even more of a disincentive if you also have high-speed
Internet access from Bell. The other issue is price: until the current
price-cap regime rolls over in 2006, it will be hard for circuit-switch
rivals to under-cut Bell. This means Sprint has to compete on a convenient
bundle of services. If you are a multi-feature user and eat up a lot of long
distance minutes, Sprint appears to be an attractive option.
Still, I wonder what impact VOIP will have on circuit-switch providers such
as Sprint and Bell. Will the technology improve to the point where having
traditional local service makes no sense if you have a high-speed connection
given that voice will be just another application? I don't see this scenario
happening any time soon but there is no doubt circuit-switch is starting to
slowly fade.
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Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld
