If Sprint has $32B to spend on a merger, perhaps they could spend $16B to upgrade their AWFUL network. I bailed from Sprint to T-Mobile due to coverage and usability issues.
Yes, T-Mobile seems to have coverage issues in some areas, but I've been able to completely, and to my satisfaction, mitigate them with the Wifi-calling feature.
Sprint had huge sections of my company that poor to no coverage. Calls dropped, data was unusable. 9 hour battery life on an S3. We had wifi for the data, but no relief for the calls. The other 3 major carriers had strong 4g signal throughout the property (Casino resort in Las Vegas).
Sprint pathetically fumbled the ball when it came to 4g, leaving some areas with 3g and 4g-wimax. Then they stopped selling Wimax phones in favor of 4g LTE phones. This seriously degraded the 3g experience everywhere I went. Orlando, Miami, Boston, Reno, Biloxi, Philadelphia, etc. were all places where I found the 3g to be unusable and on the rare occasions I got 4g it performed like 3g. My guess was that they were using the same 3g bandwidth backhaul to towers that had 4g equipment.
The short version for me was that it was years after every other carrier had 4g before I started to see the little 4g icon on my phone and a good year after that where it performed like everyone else's 4g in the much smaller number of places it was available.
In places like the LV Convention Center, I eventually had to turn off 4g because the phone would hold onto an unusable 4g connection rather than connect to the usuable (yet still slow by 3g standards) 3g connection that was apparently an in-building thing. Luckily the convention center had wifi so I could get data, but my call/text experience was pretty poor.
I don't have these problems with T-Mobile, nor my Verizon work phone. Some people here would use their work phone as a hotspot for their Sprint personal phone. My t-mobile phone does drop down to Edge at times, it's slow but consistent and has pretty good latency. The few places where I've lost voice AND data had wifi so I was fully functional which couldn't have happened with Sprint.
I can't help but think that for many years, this will be a bad experience for T-Mobile customers no matter what and a mixed bag for Sprint customers if they transition away from CDMA. I see a lot of people reluctantly jumping ship to Verizon or AT&T once the merger is final and network changes begin rolling out.