Quick time line for me.
Until Aug 2012: DC 'burbs (Germantown) was mediocre at around 50-100kbit/s on 3G, but it worked.
Aug-Sept 2012: Obvious 3G improvements. I get up to around 1.4mbit/s and it's stable.
Sept 2012-present: Suddenly, a challenger appears, and vomits all over the Sprint towers. I am LUCKY to get 5-20kbit/s in areas that get 4 full bars of 3G.
Sprint knows about it and says that "refunds will be issued when the problem is resolved". It's been broken since Sept. I got the GNex in May thinking "mid year 2012" was right around the corner. I had a Nexus S 4G and its connectivity ran circles around this phone.
I love my GNex, but Sprint's dropped the ball, badly, by taking not one, not two, but an order of magnitude TEN steps back in the DC area for service reliability on 3G, let alone 4G LTE progress.
Hearing that other markets are being fast tracked? Great, but if fast tracked leads you to where DC is now, then your fast track plan is obviously fubar.
The worst part? Verizon LTE is 4 bars everywhere I go, with 15-20Mbit/s steady.
If I weren't on a family plan, I'd have left already. I get that they're building a possibly better market environment, but when they reduce the existing one to tatters for months at a time, with no timeline to hope?
Faith wanes.