Sprint cell phone customers in western Malibu have been experiencing poor cell phone service for several months, including the inability to make calls, poor quality calls, dropped calls and lack of data service such as texting. A Sprint customer service representative said a cell tower outage on Point Dume was fixed on Dec. 3, but the problems persist and the company likely would not respond until more residents complained en masse.
Trancas Highlands resident MiChela Anderson e-mailed her neighbors two weeks ago complaining of the services.
“It’s been driving us NUTS up here—many calls, few results, very unpredictable for months now,” Anderson wrote. “We definitely want to add our voices [to the complaints].”
On the website cellreception. com, one local identifying himself as living on Point Dume, Dume Dr., Malibu, gave Sprint a rating of one out of five stars in a posting on Dec. 3.
“About 4 months ago, our average reception with Sprint on Point Dume turned to poor and at times no reception,” the commenter wrote. “We are so frustrated by this. Please do something about this, Sprint—and soon!”
A customer service representative contacted by The Malibu Times explained that the company has attempted repairs, but the repairs have not yet fixed the problem.
According to Sprint customer service ticket numbers (assigned to repairs), one problem was identified as a “single cell tower outage at Point Dume,” which was resolved on 12/3. A second ticket set up for general complaints about “voice outage, blocked and dropped calls” was marked as resolved on 12/7.
When questioned about the reports of erratic service, officials at the Sprint Corporate Communication office said they were unaware of a problem.
“In the past 90 days, we have not seen major performance declines [in western Malibu] but there were a few reports of voice drops,” reported Heather Wong with the Corporate Communication office. “The Malibu area is difficult in general due to the hilly terrain.”
This is not the first time Sprint customers in Malibu have dealt with problems in the area.
In July 2011, similar cell phone problems with Sprint were reported by a number of Malibu Park residents. City councilmember Laura Rosenthal contacted Sprint at the time and learned that the problems were caused by a downed cell tower. After she managed to speak to the assistant to the president of Sprint, the problems were fixed shortly thereafter.
A Sprint customer service official said that problems are not escalated to priority repair status until a number of people call in to file a complaint. “The more people who complain, the faster the company will respond,” the official said.
To report a problem with coverage, Sprint customers are advised to press *2 on your cell phone, select Technical Support or Contact Sprint, and report the problem to the live customer service representative who answers.
Underestimated capacity?
Some residents believe Sprint and other cell companies have miscalculated how many customers are using its Malibu cell facilities.
Members of the city’s now-defunct Telecommunications Commission had come to believe that part of the reason many residents in Malibu experience poor cell service is that cell phone companies have designed their system to handle the number of listed Malibu residents and not taken into consideration the daily influx of thousands of workers, commuters in cars and tourists who also use Malibu’s networks to make cell phone calls.
At a March 2012 meeting of the commission, a Sprint representative said their priorities tend to be on “educational institutions, city government and large businesses.”
Commissioners thought that a mistake.
“With forty thousand commuters up and down PCH every day talking on their cell phones,” then-chair Ryan Embree said, “these are people whose bills [for phone service] are not being sent to Malibu, they’re being sent to Culver City, Oxnard, or wherever they live.”
Zora Bagdhasarian, another commissioner, asked the representative whether the demographics for Sprint’s towers were based on the few thousand people who live in Malibu or the millions of people who visit the coastal city each summer.
Sprint presented maps of their cell tower locations showing that most are clustered in the Civic Center area, a good thing for Pepperdine and City Hall, but not such a good thing for western Malibu.
Then-Commissioner Scott Tallal told Sprint, “You have four towers where the population of Malibu isn’t, and no towers where the population of Malibu is the Point Dume area.”
Sprint said the issue of continuous coverage and dropped calls won’t be resolved until the city’s terrain is studied more closely and repeaters are installed in all of the canyons. He explained that in order to find the “holes,” the company sends out what it calls its CNS team. It is unclear whether this engineering study has taken place yet.