So, I was thinking of canceling all AT&T services over this. Does anyone know of good alternatives for cellular service that don't do the same crap?
#BoycottATT
#BoycottATT
AT&T and Verizon have the most money so they do it the most.
If you want to use something a little less ... tainted, you can look into MVNOs. They buy bulk service from the major carriers and sell it to you at a reduced cost (with usually fewer "benefits").
Be sure to look to who actually owns the MVNO though. I know, for example, that AT&T owns Cricket and T-Mobile owns MetroPCS.
I've never done business with them, so I can't say anything else about them.
Another option might be Google Fi.
I've heard good things, but be aware that they charge by the gigabyte for data. Also, the list of compatible phones is pretty short.
> Fight Trump and get unlimited data on the nation’s largest and most dependable 4G LTE network[0]
I hate donald and everything he 'stands' for, but don't lower yourself to his level just to sell your service.
One other bit, it's really not clear anywhere on their site if you can bring your own device to use with their service... They really want you to buy one of their devices. That's too bad.
Credo's whole sales pitch is that they're connected to liberal causes, and they donate money to those causes. Of course they're going to take jabs at Trump.
While searching for Credo's BYOD policy, I found this article: http://www.thepeoplesview.net/main/epeoplesview.net/2013/12/...
If what that article says is true, I have to withdraw my recommendation of Credo.
Also, as light users, the bill went from $40/month/phone to $10/month/phone; starve the beast and whatnot.
As a bonus, they are a big enough evil monopoly to shove the lowly US telcos around, so you can choose between the Verizon, AT&T or T-Mobile network.
One more thing: They are very friendly towards oddball devices. I had a Nokia 900 that they happily sent me a SIM card to fit, and helped me with APN settings (the defaults almost worked but needed to be tweaked a bit). They also more recently helped me get an iPad mini set up on the Sprint side. It took some finagling by the support person since they don't officially support that device, but they got me up and going. Their support staff is alway super friendly, I've never met a grumpy one even back when I was beta testing GSM on Windows Phone devices for them and had to call in several times a week.
No, and the AT&T thing is just for copper.
If only they didn't break Google Voice if you used it.
I have stopped giving out my google voice number because I have less confidence in anybody being able to reach me at my GV number ten years from now (vs what is currently my t-mobile number).
Project Fi shares a lot of the same features Google Voice has: https://support.google.com/fi/answer/6159953
So it appears Project Fi doesn't work with Google Voice not because the latter is being abandoned, but because Project Fi is based in part on Google Voice so you can't use both at the same time. Google Fiber home phone service also appears to leverage Google Voice infrastructure: https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/03/29/google-fiber-rolls-...
I would probably suggest porting your Google Voice number to a secondary Google account if you don't want to make your Google Voice number your Project Fi number instead.
Edit: here are the details: https://fi.google.com/about/faq/#plan-and-pricing-extra-high...
I switched to ProjectFI. Works great so far because I am basically always on WIFI, I realize this solution wont work for everyone.
Well, at least for not doing it in the same political direction as AT&T, et al., CREDO mobile might be an option.
You can't receive texts from other Twilio numbers, which doesn't sound that bad, until you realize that virtually every verification SMS from most services also use Twilio. I wouldn't get 90% of my 2FA SMS codes anymore after trying to use it.
Also, data is super expensive on Twilio Wireless. After one day of just background data (no browsing or streaming) I was charged ~$15 (for the 100MBish of data I used off of Wi-Fi).
There are all kinds of other problems with it too as a cell service.
There are some really good reasons to use Twilio Wireless though, but not for mobile phone service. It's great for IoT hobby projects.
That seems like it would be the easiest thing for them to get working out of all the wireless stuff, did you report that issue to them?
What they didn't tell me, but I assume, is that some popular discord servers require phone verification to limit spam... and if anyone could just use a VoIP number as that phone verification, then that wouldn't work. (It still doesn't work, of course, but they think it does.) I, of course, just want to have an account recovery phone number, but they conflate the two uses of the phone number (person identifier, versus arbitrary second factor).
TL;DR, a lot of places are dumb and intentionally prevent you from using any sort of "recyclable" phone number. It helps them keep up the illusion that a phone number uniquely identifies exactly one person. Maybe that's true in South Korea, but it isn't here. So it just screws legitimate users for no reason.
You absolutely can receive texts from other Twilio numbers. It's shortcodes you can't receive from (which is definitely a problem).
Your data would be cheaper if you set the billing mode to "individual" (and not "pooled"), which will charge you for blocks of 1GB at a time. Having said that, data will still probably not be cheaper than a normal retail cell plan.
Aside from that, another issue is lack of MMS support. Twilio Wireless is designed for IoT use cases, so general cell phone use isn't something it's optimized for.
(Source/Disclosure: I'm the engineer who built the first version of Twilio Wireless.)