I have a love/hate relationship with Verizon. Okay, more often hate/hate, but still. They have the best network in this area when we're out in the sticks. But their pricing is pretty high. They'll offer $800 on a new iPhone, and then the credit comes one month at a time over 36 months. Meanwhile, you're paying $70-80 per phone. You might as well take the upgrade when available, if you're going to stick with them, because otherwise you're just paying for other people's upgrades.
I'd switch to Visible (the Verizon prepaid) and pay half the price, except they don't yet support standalone Apple watches. So we continue to pay almost $200/mo for a family of four (with only two real smartphones), because of those watches. Some day the kids will be old enough that my wife will let them have smartphones, and we'll switch to some plan that costs half as much.
Who else has cheap data sims? Is this still a killer feature of GoogleFi alone (one time $5 fee for a data sim)?
I really wish companies would be happy to sell data. Making a bunch of addon charges to get me to he point where I can consume data is such a defiance of what these companies best utility should be: carrying data.
The one other thing that almost wholly shapes who I'd go with for an MVNO is what speed I get after soft cap. Everyone has unlimited & everyone will eventually slow you down to much slower speeds: what life is like after that threshold is why I cling to my absurdly expensive very grandfathered Verizon Unlimited, which they won't even let me bump my SMS allowance on.
This is exactly my biggest question about every network out there. What happens after soft-cap?
> The one other thing that almost wholly shapes who I'd go with for an MVNO is what speed I get after soft cap.
This should have to be advertised alongside any deal in big bold print. It should be in the main paragraph outlining the plan in every review. But instead it's often buried somewhere in terms & service, or uses vague words like "lowered priority" (even though it just means you'll be soft capped). If it's available at all. And most reviews / descriptions of plans don't mention this. The awareness around this issue needs to be the focus of most of these plans, in my view.
Agreed. I recently travelled over the US border to Canada (to a major city) and was shocked by the International data pittance, and what Verizon considers "3G speed". Crossing that imaginary line took me back almost 15 years and as much as I want to blame Verizon and their CA partner, apparently they're one of the "better ones"!
I use visible. It has been trash basically everywhere I go. I live in austin and it's almost completely useless there. I haven't traveled to a single area yet where I've been happy with the service.
Yup, there are plenty of MVNOs out there that operate on your choice of network. I use US Mobile, which I'm generally happy with. I haven't even had to think about it really for the past 2 years. Better yet, there was a recent price reduction, instead of a price increase as I was almost always dealing with on Verizon or AT&T. I think I went from $25/mo to $21/mo.
What a wreck. Then, I'm never surprised. It's always been a rip-off built on having the "next best thing" at all times. Well, a price is paid for that, as you demonstrate. Blech!
I'd switch to Visible (the Verizon prepaid) and pay half the price, except they don't yet support standalone Apple watches. So we continue to pay almost $200/mo for a family of four (with only two real smartphones), because of those watches. Some day the kids will be old enough that my wife will let them have smartphones, and we'll switch to some plan that costs half as much.