Not that long ago, Sprint in the Twin Cities was known for its continually dropped calls, subpar data performance and poor customer service, among other problems. Customers responded: They dropped Sprint.

But you’d never get the carrier to admit that, right?

Wrong.

A new Sprint has embarked on a mea-culpa campaign and brought in a freshly minted regional executive to lure back the customers he acknowledges the company burned badly — and lost — between 2011 and 2014.

That time period saw critical network-infrastructure upgrades with serious side effects, such as the dropped-call epidemic, said Michael McMahon, president of Sprint’s Edina-based Great Plains Region. With those upgrades now complete, the carrier is operating smoothly and is roughly competitive with its rivals, he claims.

“It was rough going for some people while we were going through our transition,” McMahon said. “Now, with all those investments in place, we are reaching out to those (old) customers. We’d love to have you back.”

Sprint in the Twin Cities is now about on par with At&T, T-Mobile and Verizon in dropped-call frequency, according to independent testing by RootMetrics. As for data performance, Sprint ranks second after Verizon, according to RootMetrics tests conducted during the second half of 2015.

Sprint’s median download speed in the Twin Cities increased from 11.6 megabits per second in the first half of 2015 to 19.2 megabits a second in the second half, RootMetrics found.

Informal Pioneer Press testing in St. Paul shows Sprint on par with Verizon in data-download speeds, but much slower than Verizon in data-upload speeds.

Sprint also now ranks second after Verizon in overall performance, including voice calling and texting, RootMetrics found.

Still, Sprint remains an underdog with many issues, including a decade of red ink, limited LTE coverage compared to competitors, and dependence on a wireless spectrum that has a restricted range. LTE is short for “long term evolution,” the high-speed technology used by all four big carriers for data service.

Coverage “has always been Sprint’s LTE weakness because their fastest (technology) uses a kind of radio spectrum that only goes relatively short distances from the tower,” said Sascha Segan, a PC Magazine wireless expert who runs a yearly Internet speed drive-test project called Fastest Mobile Networks.

In the Twin Cities, however, McMahon said Sprint is taking major steps to ensure seamless coverage and optimal performance.

This, according to McMahon, includes complementing the carrier’s big towers with about 1,000 “small cells” mounted on light poles and other structures in denser portions of the Twin Cities. Other carriers, like Verizon, have taken similar steps to boost data performance.

Sprint already has installed about 30 small cells in Minneapolis in a test capacity, McMahon said, and the rest of the small cells will be in place by summer.

Sprint has invested about a quarter of a billion dollars in network upgrades in the Twin Cities during the last three years, he said.

The carrier is also making major operational changes intended to make it more consumer-friendly, he added. The company, based in the Kansas City area, recently divvied up the nation into 18 regions, each with its own chief.

McMahon, as president of the new Great Plains Region, oversees Iowa, Nebraska and the Dakotas in addition to Minnesota. He said he is responsible for virtually everything within this region, including sales and customer service.

“Prior to this change in January, we were a siloed organization,” McMahon said.

The carrier also has added 120 jobs in the Twin Cities, mostly in retail stores. It has 19 corporate stores in Minnesota, all but four in the Twin Cities. Roughly an equal number of franchisee-owned stores operate in the state.

Sprint now faces the daunting chore of convincing those skeptical, jilted onetime customers that they should give the carrier a fresh look, which McMahon acknowledges will take time.

Sprint is offering a few sweeteners, such as a no-risk 30-day trial along with a 50-percent discount on any wireless plan from a competitor through April 21.

“We should be charging a premium for our service, but we want to get the word out that we’re a great choice,” McMahon said.