Edward C. Baig

USA TODAY

NEW YORK—“Can you hear me now” was associated with Verizon Wireless TV ads that began in 2002 and ended about 9 years later.

Now the actor with the horn-rimmed glasses who delivered that famous catchphrase as Verizon’s “Test Man” character has changed his allegiances. Paul Marcarelli is now a Sprint customer, and is appearing in TV spots for the nation’s fourth-largest wireless carrier, the first of which ran Sunday night during the NBA finals.

In the Sprint ads, Marcarelli calls attention to the fact that Sprint’s network is vastly improved.

“Hey, I’m Paul, and I used to ask `If you could hear me now with Verizon?’ Not anymore.”

After mentioning that he’s moved to Sprint, Marcarelli goes on to say that, “guess what, it’s 2016, and every network is great. In fact, Sprint’s reliability is now within 1% of Verizon.”

Indeed, Sprint’s pitch to consumers is that you can get a network that is nearly the same as Verizon’s in reliability but at rates Sprint claims are half what you'll pay under most Verizon, AT&T or T-Mobile rate plans.

Sprint is basing the 1% network-reliability differential cited in the ad on its own analysis of independent drive test data from Nielsen, covering the top 106 metropolitan markets in the U.S.

Sprint did not disclose what it was paying Marcarelli to appear in its ads, and the actor himself was not made available for an interview.

Back in the day, Verizon was even reluctant to give out too many details about the actor. A Verizon advertising executive told USA TODAY in 2004 that the company’s “casting specifications called for an everyman with something quirky or memorable about them.” Marcarelli played a technician whose job was to verify the quality of Verizon's network in all sorts of wayward locations.

In a phone interview, Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure says Marcarelli was a “free agent“ who is being “very factual” in the new ads.

“Our goal is basically to get people when they’re watching our ads or watching social media to pay attention…. I think a lot of people are going to recognize Paul and see (him) in a (Sprint-colored) yellow tee show and ask themselves, `what happened?’”

Claure, who became CEO of the beleaguered carrier in 2014, has been cutting costs as part of a turnaround plan. During the interview he said that this latest quarter is the first in which Sprint beat both AT&T and Verizon in terms of adding new customers and the first year among the past few years that Sprint had positive operating income and free cash flow.

“We feel very good at where we are and where we are going,” Claure says of Sprint, which is owned by Japan’s SoftBank. As of March 31, Sprint says it served more than 58.8 million connections.

Still, T-Mobile officially jumped past Sprint last summer to become the third largest carrier in the U.S..

The wireless companies are constantly playing a game of one-upmanship. The new Sprint ad appears ahead of T-Mobile’s latest “Un-carrier” marketing initiative, when it announced it was giving away its stock to customers .

T-Mobile is giving customers shares in the company

Meantime, the Sprint ad concludes with Marcarelli saying, “So I switched to Sprint and millions more have too. Can you hear that?”

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter