Has your cellphone provider put your safety at risk?

You were driving across Long Island when your car broke down. You go to call roadside assistance, but you can’t get service. You get out of the car and start walking, when you see several figures coming at you in the dark. As they step into the light, you realize that they’re not looking for new friends. You try to make an emergency call to 911, but your phone indicates “No Service Available”.

This fictitious story could come true as Sprint’s new upgrades are leaving some of their newest and most popular phones without service, and Sprint does not seem to care one bit.

For the past month, I have been fighting with Sprint to take back two Galaxy S5’s which constantly miss receiving inbound calls, messages and even loses service overall. Just 20 days after buying the phone, I made it to a Sprint store to fix the phone, only to be told that the issue was not with my phone, but caused by the upgrades on the network. Additional research on the Sprint Community message boards (as well as non-Sprint sponsored boards) confirmed the issue, and even the representatives who answer the Sprint Cares support email confirm they are trying to get the issue resolved on the S5 via software with Samsung, but they don’t have an ETA at this time. The only [temporary] solution provided was to “Turn on Airplane mode for five minutes, then turn it back off.”, forcing the phone to try to reconnect to their network. Even if this does work, it is only temporary and the phone can lose its connection again when it tries to jump between cell towers again.

Numerous pleas with Agents, Supervisors and even their escalation groups have resulted in hours of frustration, yet no resolution or signs that Sprint is concerned at all about its customers. The only thing I asked of any of the representatives was that they allow me to return the phones as they do not function properly on the Sprint network.

My Galaxy S5 sits on my desk, dormant as I was forced to reactivate an older phone (which does not suffer from the LTE hand-off issue). Sprint expects me to continue to pay $27/month for two years (total of $650) for the Galaxy S5 for which it can not provide reliable service on.