Visible, One Month Later: Here's Why I'm Leaving
Around a month ago, AT&T shut my phone off suddenly. I called and was told it was due to a “mismatched IMEI number.” I thought this was strange since I hadn’t switched phones or anything, and my new iPhone 11 was activated a month prior to this happening. At the time, I suspected this to be the fault of my iPhone. So when I called customer support, I had them reprovision the SIM on my Google Pixel.
I didn’t mind my Pixel, I actually prefer Android for most things. I even switched to Android as my main platform for six and a half months due to the pandemic and wanting something to be different.
If I’m being honest, I’ve only elected to stick with Apple’s side of the camp for all these years because of iMessage, FaceTime, and device-to-device continuity (I have an Apple Watch, iPad and three Macs). If there were actual competitors available on Android at a system-level (besides RCS and Google Duo), you bet I’d jump ship permanently, right now.
A few days passed and it happened again, they disabled my service randomly (though it eventually came back on its own). I had enough and decided to port myself out to Visible. Let me tell you, porting out was the best part of the experience. I elected to use an eSIM, which seemed to be the fastest escape route. Gave them the account number, PIN, and all those fun details, within the hour I was set up. Only went without cell service for about 30 minutes. Quick and painless.
My past month with Visible has been a mixed bag. Originally, I had made a Thread discussing my feedback for Visible nearly one month in. I stated that, due to most of my issues being related to an eSIM, I’d be switching to a physical SIM. Obviously plans have changed. Now, I fully believe that Visible has yet to truly mature as a digital-only cell carrier. I agree it’s the future, yes, but I don’t know if we’re there quite yet.
So what’s so bad anyways? Well, I’ll tell you. Let’s split everything into three different categories: the good, the meh, the bad. Then I’ll explain why I’m leaving for US Mobile, as those of you who follow my Twitter and/or Reddit may already know.
The Good
- Verizon’s LTE network, there’s at least some coverage wherever I am. Usually nothing less than 2 bars.
- Unlimited data. Like, truly unlimited. I never really hit the “heavy usage” mark, so I never got throttled. I was never in a high traffic area, so I never really got deprioritized. Around a month later, I’ve used 8GB of data putting Visible through its paces. Never noticed any sort of throttle or deprioritizing. When it decides to work, it works.
- Excellent customer service. And I mean excellent. So nice, in fact, that it felt like I was talking to someone who genuinely wanted to assist me with whatever questions I had (and went out of their way to ask me how I was doing!)
- Along with that last one: 24/7 customer service! And they assist with all your problems! So great.
The Meh
- Data speeds. They weren’t fast, nor slow. Depending on signal strength, especially in somewhat spotty areas (1-2 bars LTE): I never got below 7-10 Mbps, but never got higher than 35 Mbps either. This is acceptable, just something to look out for.
- Video streams as high as 720p, but any higher is an issue. (It’s fine, since it advertises 480p and 720p is fine anyways.)
- Calls were okay, definitely not great. Quality left more to be desired despite being VoLTE. Words were generally hard to understand.
The Bad
- Calls between my dad and I broke for a while, unfortunately, since it was around the time Visible customers couldn’t call Google Fi customers for whatever reason.
- eSIM is awful. (I mean, just look at all the people having some sort of issue with Visible eSIMs on Reddit.) My iPhone 11 randomly disconnects from the network and repeatedly tells me there’s no eSIM on my phone. Sometimes, I’d have LTE but the signal bars would be grayed out entirely. It was weird. I can’t really fault Apple or Visible for this since eSIM is relatively new, but at least they were (publicly) receptive to my feedback on this specific note.
- In order to switch from eSIM to a physical SIM (like I had initially wanted to do), I’d have to go without service for a week. This is because of some weird thing with them being a cloud-based network. I can’t just buy a SIM from Amazon or wherever and activate it like I can for other networks, and have them provision it. I had to get a “replacement for a lost SIM” to make it work. I don’t know how much I buy that, but customer service was nice enough about it, so I’m just running with that.
- Wi-Fi Calling (and by extension: sending SMS messages over Wi-Fi) never worked for me. Never. No matter what I did, and no matter what support tried to do, it refused to work. Except at Walmart. Anywhere else: nope, I was on my own for whatever reason. This was frustrating in the areas where I actually didn’t have service, but those were few and far between anyways.
- Lack of supported phones. Especially Android phones. Support for Android, my preferred platform, is abysmal at best. Having it only work on the latest phones and only a few old flagships defeats the purpose of a budget, prepaid, cost-saving network like Visible. It’s kind of unfortunate.
I truly hoped I’d completely fall in love with Visible. Their selling points were true, sure… but the issues with eSIM, Wi-Fi Calling, calls breaking between my dad and I, and the lack of supported Android phones certainly broke that ability for me.
Maybe someday in a few years, when Visible improves their systems, I’ll consider switching back. For now, I’m leaving (as I said earlier) for US Mobile, where I’ll be testing their Unlimited All plan on their Super LTE (Verizon) network. And I’m excited this time, since I punched in all my IMEI numbers for my phones and they are actually compatible. And I get a physical SIM!
Thank goodness.