This is the tale of one guy trying to activate one handset on Sprint. My current cell phone is on Nextel. My EVDO card bills on SPrintPCS. They have not been combined in 2 years. So after 20 minutes trying, I email Sprint and get this reply:

I understand that you wish to activate your handset to the current plan. As your account is on the Nextel network, the handsets with the Sprint logo cannot be activated on the Nextel account. Therefore, I request you to activate a handset with the Nextel Logo or a power source handset.
Further, as you wish to share your plan, the current plan National Free Incoming Plan will not be compatible as it is the individual plan. It need to be updated with a plan compatible with the family plans.

I call today and spend 40 minutes talking to 8 different people as they shunt me from department to department until the VoIP calling falls apart and the CS rep hangs up on me because he can not hear me. Eight different people. Three couldn't even see my SprintPCS account. Even when I tried just to activate the PPC6700 on the SprintPCS account, there were issues. This does not bode well for Sprint. You can't even activate handsets for existing customers. How do you raise ARPU? More importantly, how do you retain customers?

I am currently locked out of my SprintPCS online account. No idea why. One person said it might be due to an update.

This is telecom. Broken. Like the economy. Just when we need communication services to be strong.