T-Mobile gets sued some more, this time by a Sprint customer furious for losing 5G access
After causing a lot of public controversy during a lengthy regulatory approval process that extended from June 2018 all the way to April 2020, the mega-merger between T-Mobile and Sprint gradually disappeared from the spotlight as a new second biggest player of the US wireless industry emerged.
But while the rapidly growing "Un-carrier" made dozens and dozens of headlines with its market-leading 5G network expansion and upgrades, as well as a series of irresistible deals designed to transition all Sprint customers to a faster and faster signal with minimal effort and little to no spending, some of these customers were apparently not treated very fairly.
One such Sprint subscriber (as of the end of 2020, at least) has decided to seek justice for his troubles, filing a new lawsuit against T-Mobile, which clearly makes a whole lot more sense than the class action recently launched by a group of Verizon and AT&T customers as an indirect (and somewhat silly) consequence of the same controversial union between the former numbers three and four US carriers.
After purchasing a 5G-enabled OnePlus 7 Pro from a Sprint store in February 2020, plaintiff Jose Luis Garcia Moreno lost 5G access just two weeks later. The "defect" couldn't be remedied as T-Mobile pulled the plug on its new daughter's 5G network, and along with the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, LG V50 ThinQ 5G, and HTC 5G Hub, said OnePlus model never received support for Magenta's superior 5G network.
Adding insult to injury, many users of these crippled devices were allegedly asked to pay off their phones or choose significantly pricier plans to be allowed to switch to T-Mobile. Because 5G was undoubtedly a key selling point for the aforementioned products, Mr. Moreno is looking for financial compensation for himself and "all others similarly situated."
T-Mo, by the way, is accused of having explicitly promised that Sprint customers with the OnePlus 7 Pro and "three other 5G-enabled devices" would be offered a "truly mobile 5G experience" in all the cities initially covered by Sprint's 5G signal, which never proved to be the case.
On top of everything, the plaintiff claims that "many of the Class Devices" are bound to become "wholly unusable" once T-Mobile wraps up all the various network shutdown processes currently ongoing, although that's obviously true for other phones as well and might lead to additional lawsuits in the future if people are not happy with their upgrade deals.
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