Help Terrible problems with Nexus 5x and Google support

[leec03]

I have a new (6 week old) phone on Project Fi service. I like the phone, the business model, and the overall technology. But so far the implementation has been HORRIBLE.
SMS messaging has never worked to devices outside of Google's Hangouts structure, so it's worthless. And now that I using the phone more and more I find it drops almost 50% of my calls! It's like the dark ages of cell phones.
To top it off Google's support is a joke, a bad one. I'm assigned to a support rep and when I complained about the lack of SMS support she suggested that maybe I would be happier with a different (more expensive) carrier! It seemed like "if you paid more you could get more".
Support had me run through a batch of tests that took about 1.5 hours, and send the result to them so they could diagnose the problem. When my "helpful" support rep called back after 10 days it was to tell me that the logs were too dated to be of use to the engineers and I needed to rerun them, when I complained about that requirement she told me that other customers had needed to produce these logs multiple times to support the engineers. Who's supposed to be supporting whom? From my perspective it's the engineers job to support me, the customer, not vice versa.
Anyone else have similar experiences? Solutions? Or is this just a hobby system, not ready for prime time?

 

[chanchan05]

Honestly, SMS always worked fine with Hangouts for me through several phones, so the question MAY indeed be with your carrier and how it supports SMS. Have you tried using an actual SMS app instead of Hangouts?

 

[leec03]

This is Google's new foray into the cell phone business, with service cobbled together from Sprint, TMobile, and local WiFi, called Project Fi. Yes, I tried the phone with hangouts turned off and using just messenger.
I'm honestly afraid the multiple carrier network has introduced complexities that are not solvable. At least it ought to be off the market until it all works reliably.
But Google has this nasty habit of releasing great ideas that are very rough in implementation. My perspective is that they have to make this right, so mater what it takes.

 

[mikedt]

This is Google's new foray into the cell phone business, with service cobbled together from Sprint, TMobile, and local WiFi, called Project Fi.

Likely dropping calls because it can't seamlessly hand-off between the various carriers and WiFi networks. You're on a call, WiFi or carrier goes out of range, it's going to drop the call.