Masayoshi Son

Sprint, for perhaps the 5th time in three years, is promising a major network turnaround in the near future that will boost their network’s performance and potentially restore the wireless provider to third place in the U.S. wireless market.

Masayoshi Son, who serves as both the CEO of Japanese carrier SoftBank and chairman of Sprint proved defensive about Sprint’s performance, which recently dropped to America’s fourth largest carrier after trading places with T-Mobile, despite posting improved financial results for the quarter.

Once again, Son told investors the state of America’s wireless network coverage was downright lousy.

“When I come to the [United] States, this network is not something you should be proud of,” Son said on a Sprint conference call with analysts. “It’s very, very bad.”

John Legere, the outspoken CEO of T-Mobile, took to Twitter to berate his smaller competitor.

“Does that make Sprint’s network ‘VERY, very, very bad’ or just completely terrible,” Legere wrote. “It’s easy to boast about your network in Japan, @masason. That’s 146k square miles, or basically most of California. #notthathard ;),” he added.

Son has been relatively quiet since failing to inspire regulators to allow him to merge Sprint and T-Mobile into a single company to help both compete more effectively against giants AT&T and Verizon Wireless. After promising to invest vast sums to improve Sprint’s relatively poor performing network and coverage area, Son seemed to disappear and Sprint started losing more customers than it could add. Some have expressed frustration about Sprint’s seemingly endless promises a network turnaround was just around the corner, but never seemed to actually materialize. Many have since left for T-Mobile, which added 2.1 million new customers this year.

Although this quarter may signal Sprint is turning things around by adding 675,000 net new customers, analysts question whether Sprint’s drop to fourth place and the amount of spending that will be required to improve its wireless network could lead Son to ditch his shares in Sprint two years after acquiring an interest in the carrier. Son himself admitted he lost confidence in Sprint after the idea of a merger with T-Mobile flopped. But now he claims he is back, personally overseeing plans for Sprint’s next generation network with U.S. based engineers every night between 10pm-2am Japan time.

Customers seem unconvinced, peppering comment sections with reactions ranging from surprise Son was willing to criticize Sprint’s network (a criticism many agreed with), to exasperation that Sprint has promised better service for years and has yet to provide it.

“You know your carrier’s service sucks when even the CEO says it sucks,” commented one reader.