American carrier, Sprint, is offering one customer and a guest the opportunity to go on a vacation to (almost) anywhere in the United States. Sprint, which has partnered with LG, is using the competition to celebrate its improved network and the competition is for existing customers, running from today, September 2nd, for two weeks until Friday September 16th. The competition has been organized to run on the Sprint Getaway Giveaway website and the main prize is airfare, hotel accommodation, spending money and a new LG G5 smartphone to enjoy both on the trip and afterwards. There are twenty runner up prizes of just the LG G5 smartphone, which is in itself a decent prize.
As a carrier, Sprint has endured a difficult few years. Last year it was overtaken by T-Mobile US in subscriber numbers and has been relegated to the smallest of the national carriers, behind Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile US. Sprint is keen to highlight to the world that in 2016, Sprint is a reinvented and rejuvenated business. From a networking perspective, Sprint opted not to bid in the FCC’s 600 MHz LTE spectrum auction because the carrier believed that thanks to its considerable spectrum holdings at the 2.5 GHz point, any wins at the 600 MHz point would almost certainly necessitate a renegotiation of its high frequency holdings. Sprint’s take was that the 600 MHz spectrum would either not be available immediately or would be subject to a number of compromises and did not wish to participate. To this end the carrier has been working on using smarter network densification techniques such as building up the numbers of small network sites in cities and urban areas, thus allowing its network to perform strongly.
This competition is to celebrate the results from a Nielson report showing that Sprint is now ranked the third best US network, ahead of T-Mobile US and performing within 1% of both AT&T and Verizon Wireless. Sprint’s take on this news is that customers can benefit from a great quality cellular network “without overpaying.” Nielson’s report looked at network quality across more than a hundred of the US’ top urban areas. Sprint’s promise is that it will tackle each market individually, working to be the best network in that particular area before moving on to the next. The mechanics of the competition mean customers must first follow either @Sprint or @SprintLatino on Twitter. Next, they may tweet up to once per day writing where in the county they would wish to travel to in order to “experience the faster, more reliable Sprint network,” using the hashtag #SprintGetawaySweepstakes.