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Sprint's Ensemble Billing: 2 Parts Awesome, 1 Part Lame

Sprintfail

Co-Podcaster and all-around-Windows-Mobile-Expert Malatesta is reporting to us via SMS that his Sprint data isn't working. He's in New York City and started losing data yesterday at 4pm Eastern. Reprovision, reprovision... 5 times and no dice. He called up Sprint Tech Support (brave man) and they claimed: “We are experiencing a nation outage.”

We're very confident that Sprint is not actually experiencing a nationwide data outage. What's more likely is that Mal just switched over to Sprint's Ensemble Biling. Switching over to Ensemble has caused some problems for some of our forum users as well, which is a bummer because the new billing system (which everybody, slowly, is going to be migrated to eventually) is great. What's so great about Ensemble Billing?

It's not outsourced like their previous billing system, presumably meaning that once they're all-Ensemble their customer service should improve by dint of their solution being in-house and better known
You can add a “Pick 3” plan similar to T-Mobile's MyFave's or Alltel's Circle
It will move the merger of Sprint and Nextel just a little closer to completion
You can switch phones online!

That last one is really cool - just punch in your phone's data and your number can migrate to that Sprint phone you got as a hand-me-down from that rich uncle of yours, no more waiting to talk to a Sprint rep on the phone.

Still and all, who's on and who's not on the Ensemble system is still a bit of a crap shoot. Add in the crap shoot of whether or not moving to the new system will kill your ability to provision your data or keep calls from dropping and you have a lot of craps your shooting. Guess it's not just RIM that has these sorts of problems, eh?

How about you? Got Data?