Well, I’m in a bit of a pickle and not sure what I should do about it.

For several years, I’ve had cellular phone service through Verizon and I’ve never been very unhappy with the service.

Mike, Chadd, and I had the phones we use for our business set up in a family share plan with Verizon and to share 2500 minutes, it was costing us around $250 per month. Mike and I wanted to get Treo 650 smartphones so that we could eliminate the need to carry a phone and an organizer and so I could do emergency server maintenance from wherever I was.

When I was working with the guys at Guru Labs, they were all getting Treo 650s within days of it’s availability through Sprint PCS and they loved it. Dax told me he and his wife were sharing 2000 minutes and only paying $100 per month. After hearing these things, knowing the Guru Labs instructors spend countless hours on the road throughout the country and use their phones constantly, I decided we would switch to Sprint as soon as our Verizon contract was up.

That time came in March. With our new phones and a new plan with Sprint, we were looking at almost $100 in savings per month over our previous plan with Verizon. Had we stayed with Verizon and gotten Treo 650s, we would have been paying even more because Verizon’s unlimited data service for the Treo was quite a bit more than Sprint’s.

I also wanted to switch Christine to Sprint because we spend a lot of time talking to each other on the phone and it would benefit us to be with the same carrier since they all offer free phone-to-phone deals within the service provider’s network.

My parents — also with Verizon — were looking to get new phones and save on their bill so I talked them into going in on a family share plan with Christine. Everyone would save money.

My parents got the “free“ flip-phones and we got Christine a more expensive flip-phone w/ a camera and external display. Everything was hunky dory.

Over time, however, my parents noticed the audio quality of the calls were not as good as with Verizon. They found their phones roaming in areas they never had to roam before with their Verizon phones. They experienced significantly more frequent dropped calls and more noise during calls. I’ve experienced similar problems, especially when I travelled with my Treo, but I guess I was forgiving of the problem because when it does work (most of the time), the Treo rocks my world.

Now my parents are upset because they’re locked into a two year deal with phones and service they’re not happy with. I’m not sure what to do.