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Comment by selectodude | Hacker News Reader

Of the multitude of benefits of living in a major city, one of the big downsides is that in denser areas, the networks are permanently congested. I went the MVNO route for a month and in downtown Chicago on a work day, you have five bars and no service.

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Yeah I went with Mint in the South Florida metro once, and it was painful. Once a download started it finished pretty quickly, but the amount of lag between clicking a link and the page starting to load was on the order of 10-15 seconds.

Apps that pre-fetched a lot of data (like social media apps fetching a ways down your feed, music streaming apps that will fetch the next song, etc.) will operate somewhat okay but web browsing and map usage was pure hell.

The second I swapped my phone over to Verizon it was like night and day.

I might look into Mint again, now that I'm in a Verizion weakspot so to speak. Unfortunately, I took a BYOD rebate from them that they'd claw back if I left before April. :-/

I tried Mint and Visible and experienced this. In Chicago and Miami they were useless. Even iMessage didn't work. I had more than a few occasions with no messaging, ride sharing, maps, etc and it was legitimately scary (being completely stranded).

I'm now on post-paid Verizon so I at least have a fighting chance in these permanently congested metros.

Amazing how much we depend on data!

Doesn't even have to be an MVNO, depends on the priority level of your data. I have Verizon Prepaid and during weekends in a suburban downtown, my phone is almost a dead weight. In a tourist city, I'll have full bars and no service, every day from noon until night.

I’m kinda surprised to hear that. I’m on an mvno in London and have had zero issues. Only time I see congestion issues are at huge public events like like festivals or carnivals. But that tends to affect every network.

That tracks. The dense parts of Chicago are denser than the dense parts of London.

Depending on your use case - a MVNO that supports wifi calling + iMessage etc can help. It’s nice in rural areas where the signal is weak.

I'm not trying to spend $40/mo to use wifi calling and iMessage. I'd rather spend $80 and never ever have to think about it.

Agreed. I loved the concept of wifi calling when it was introduced, but it always sucks when I use it. It always manages to find all of the flaws in the network I'm using.

It's just not worth the hassle when I can rely on a cell network that specializes in real-time voice communication.

USMobile supports wifi calling.

I can confirm this.

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