Best cell phone provider?

bob_nestor wrote:

jcpainter wrote:

Tom_M wrote:
About the cheapest service out there is Visible. It is owned by Verizon thus it uses Verizon towers. If you join their Party Pay plan the total cost is $25/month for unlimited everything including hotspot use. Their cheapest phone is $50. You may be able to use your present phone.

https://www.visible.com/

But is Visible's service, like all 3rd party resellers, deprioritized?

The other problem with most MVNOs is that they don't do roaming off the host network. If you sign up for AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile you do pay a bit more, but they'll roam onto competitor services.

My cell phone supports multiple SIMs, so what I did was sign up with AT&T which mainly works most places I go. Then because I have Comcast internet at home I was eligible to get Comcast phone service for about $15/mo which runs on Verizon and put that in my phone as a second SIM service. Now I \have both AT&T and Verizon service on the same phone and it uses whichever service provides the best connection.

Verizon actually has very few roaming agreements still in use since they've been building out towers and coverage for their 5G expansion. The Visible service is deprioritized on heavily congested towers, but I haven't seen any more effect from that than the slow downs we've always seen on heavy use towers. Even streaming has been pretty much unaffected.

I have my Visible SIM installed in a Novatel 7730L hotspot that eliminates the single connection restriction. I also have a grandfathered $23.49/mo AT&T unlimited 4G/LTE data plan installed on another hotspot, and I've yet to land anywhere that one or the other hasen't worked, and usually both with one better than the other.

jcpainter wrote:

Tom_M wrote:
About the cheapest service out there is Visible. It is owned by Verizon thus it uses Verizon towers. If you join their Party Pay plan the total cost is $25/month for unlimited everything including hotspot use. Their cheapest phone is $50. You may be able to use your present phone.

https://www.visible.com/

But is Visible's service, like all 3rd party resellers, deprioritized?

The other problem with most MVNOs is that they don't do roaming off the host network. If you sign up for AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile you do pay a bit more, but they'll roam onto competitor services.

My cell phone supports multiple SIMs, so what I did was sign up with AT&T which mainly works most places I go. Then because I have Comcast internet at home I was eligible to get Comcast phone service for about $15/mo which runs on Verizon and put that in my phone as a second SIM service. Now I \have both AT&T and Verizon service on the same phone and it uses whichever service provides the best connection.

From traveling around the country I've found that there is no one provider that provides the "best" or "most coverage" everywhere. While verizon generally gives us the widest coverage range in our common travels, there are places where verizon is zip, ATT great and vice versa. My advice is to talk to others in your travel areas and see what they say about coverage.

T mobile is a GSM network as is ATT. so if T mobile allows roaming normally it will use an ATT tower if a t mobile tower is not nearby.

jcpainter wrote:


But is Visible's service, like all 3rd party resellers, deprioritized?

Have personally not experienced any access or slower data service with Visible yet. It's been very consistent. Service includes both 5G/4G unlimited mobile data.

Here's a mobile data speed test from my iPhone Plus 4G phone just now:





Note that the hotspot is limited to one device connected at a time, with speed generally set at 5Mbps down/up. Though I've had hotspot download speeds as high as 30Mbps on the National Mall in DC.

As far as range, Verizon. We've been in places camping that we had service, but others on other providers did not.

Tom_M wrote:
About the cheapest service out there is Visible. It is owned by Verizon thus it uses Verizon towers. If you join their Party Pay plan the total cost is $25/month for unlimited everything including hotspot use. Their cheapest phone is $50. You may be able to use your present phone.

https://www.visible.com/

But is Visible's service, like all 3rd party resellers, deprioritized?

About the cheapest service out there is Visible. It is owned by Verizon thus it uses Verizon towers. If you join their Party Pay plan the total cost is $25/month for unlimited everything including hotspot use. Their cheapest phone is $50. You may be able to use your present phone.

https://www.visible.com/