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Comment by doctoboggan | Hacker News Reader

I am looking to upgrade my phone, and at the same time leave my carrier (Verizon). The price I pay for 2 people compared to the price I see out there for other carriers is just too large.

Any suggestions for me while I shop around for "tier 2" carriers? I am primarily concerned with price, and then network coverage second (I am OK with sometimes being throttled, but would prefer to avoid large gaps in any coverage).

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You've got other good answers. But basically: there's no reason to not go with an MVNO. It's literally the same service for a fraction of the price. Pick one with whatever main carrier has the best coverage in your area.

Wikipedia has a solid table of U.S. MVNO's, for a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_virtual_network...

I use Visible which uses Verizon’s network, at a steep discount. Never had any issues.

Yeah Visible keeps popping up on recommendation threads. I'll take a look at their offers. Do you suggest I buy a phone through them, or purchase from apple directly and bring it to the plan?

Unless they offer a discount, there won’t be a benefit buying through them, especially with eSIM.

What happens when the sub-carrier gets deprioritized so that the main carrier's customers get priority? How frequently does your bandwidth suffer? You say never, but is that really the case or you've just become used to it? I know several people on these places like Boost or Metro or whatever, and their streaming experiences definitely take hits

I use Mint which was an MVNO for T-Mobile. They've since been acquired by T-Mobile, but I haven't really experienced any difference in service. I also haven't used Visible, so I can't directly speak to that but Visible is owned by Verizon FWIW.

I probably experience times with deprioritization. 5G service can go from getting several hundred megabits with pretty low latencies to only getting a few megabits with potentially up to 100ms or so latency, depending on crowds. I don't recall any times where I had good signal but couldn't get any data, but definitely been in places where it'll struggle to do video chats or something at a big live event that doesn't have the extra 5G infra deployed. For example, an extra large crowd at the park for some event will probably give poor network experience but I'll otherwise get good connectivity in a modern sports arena.

In the end it's just a value proposition. Is having really fast network everywhere, all the time really that worth it to you? For many the answer is yes. But for me, on my personal device, if I'm getting poor data rates that's probably a clue I should really be putting my phone down and get back into whatever is happening in the park so I don't mind and the savings are quite nice.

For Visible, anything above their cheapest plan will give you the same priority as postpaid Verizon. Many prepaid carriers will gladly take more money to shift you to a higher priority.

There is a list of all the prioritization tiers (aka QCI, or premium data) on all the three main US carriers here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/1mxogtx/data_pr...

I used to use them, and I had two issues:

1. Their international plan is garbage, and if you don’t use the international plan, you cannot usefully use them as a phone-and-SMS-over-WiFi only solution in conjunction with another carrier. Competitors like USMobile do not have this problem.

2. Their customer support and website are very bad.

SMS works over WiFi? Or is that only RCS? Not familiar with this

SMS seems to work on “Wi-Fi Calling” aka “VoWiFi” despite the name rather strongly suggesting voice.

US Mobile is really good. You can also get on any carrier you want via it (and multiple if you are really inclined)

I've been satisfied with Mint. I look a Google Fi 2x a year, but Mint is still cheaper.

Can confirm. I’m currently on Mint and have used Tello before. They both offer great service.

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