Visible Verizon low cost alternative
 

Visible seems to be lacking LTE in Rural America coverage which most Verizon prepaid carriers have. At least Verizon ST has coverage between Nashville and Lexington.

Not sure if the phone has Canadian/Mexican roaming or at what price.

"Altice Mobile will use AT&T and Sprint's networks to deliver its service."

https://www.cnet.com/news/altice-off...st-20-a-month/

The industry term for these kinds of businesses is "MVNO" - mobile virtual network operator. Wikipedia has a reasonably current list of the ones currently operating in the USA at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...work_operators. It's a hard list to keep current though; setting up an MVNO isn't hard, and there are lots of them.

Most of them, though, don't switch carriers dynamically; your phone is set to use one of them, period. Google Fi (and maybe others by now) will switch depending on signal strength.

The difference between Visible and most of the other MVNO's is that they are actually owned by the company who's network they use - Verizon.

The other network also have their own MVNO's - Cricket for AT&T, Boost for Sprint, and "Metro by T-Mobile" for T-Mobile.

Where your issues coverage or something else?

Did you ever give it a second look?

I used Visible for a month.

Coverage was good, except at home where it was marginal (despite living in the SF Bay Area, at home I get excellent coverage with T-mobile, good with Sprint, just OK with Verizon, and none with AT&T!) - but WIFI calling covered that.

I scored an unlocked Moto e6 and a months worth of service for $20 via their trade-in program (traded in some ~8 year old Android 2.x device).

Their normal month rate of $40 is good without being great, but you can join a "Party" with others and get that down to $25. This isn't like normal family plans - everyone gets their own bill so you can pretty much jump join-up with anyone (there is a Reddit group for finding people).

Port-in was easy. Port-out required using online chat to get the account number/PIN, but otherwise was easy.

I moved (back) to Mint Mobile after a month simply because they had 3 months free service during the Superbowl. One that 3 months is up I'll certainly consider going back to Visible.

The main complaint I've see about them is support if anything goes wrong. Ironically for a phone company they don't have phone support - online chat only.

Many MVNO's are not owned by the network operators so Visible is not unusual for an MVNO. Ting, Red Rocket, Straight Talk, Tracfone, etc, all use multiple networks. Straight Talk is the largest MVNO with plans on the 3 remaining network operators since T Mobile now owns Sprint as of 4/1. Boost will be sold off leaving T Moible with Metro PCS.

https://prepaidcompare.net/profiles/ for a list of the biggest MVNO's

I just signed up with Visible. A couple of things learned...

Be crystal clear with them about ‘bringing your phone number’. They got confused by the fact that I did NOT want to port my number
and after several chats they sent me a SIM card which they switched off before it arrived. Three support hours wasted.

Their Twitter support is much better than Chat support on their website.

Be sure to sign up for the discount program called ‘Party Pay’. $25 per month instead of $40

Do you have a link to that comparison?

here are some comparisons, also Google or if you dont believe them duckduckgo

https://duckduckgo.com/

https://www.androidcentral.com/best-...ives-google-fi

https://www.androidcentral.com/visible-vs-google-fi

After looking at the coverage maps, it is difficult to say one is better than the other. In my local area Google after a short distance moves from 4G to 3G to 2G. While Visible has the same area as 4G.

Howard Forums has more user provided information for Google Fi and Visible.

I've been using Red Pocket on Verizon for a few months and it's working well for me.

I bought a limited time offer annual plan on Ebay for $210 which includes unlimited data, voice and texts. No other fees or taxes. The data has a 5Gb per month cap on high speed LTE then it drops to 128kbps I think. I just ran a speed test and got 70Mbps down and 33Mpbs up.
The plan was on sale for a month or so, but it has gone back to the regular fee of $240 a year.($20 a Month)

I have a dual sim iPhone 11 Pro Max and my primary T-Mobile line is on the esim, with Red Pocket in the sim slot. I get great TM service locally and got this mostly as an experiment and for road trips out west where TM has some weak spots.

I never exceed 2Gb of data on my main T-Mobile plan, but for less than $20 a month, it's comforting to have a second carrier with good local service also. This service has hotspot included but no wifi calling or esim yet. A free sim and shipping is included in the price. I got my wife a $60 Red Pocket/Verizon annual plan with 500Mb of LTE per month then hard capped, 100 minutes voice and 100 text messages per month. Her setup is with her primary TM line on an iPhone XR with esim. It's a nice little backup service for $5 a month, and she likes having an alternate phone number also.

Red Pocket is a good MVNO. There are actually a lot of good MVNO's. I moved my mom to Ting for about $25 per month.

I will look in to red pocket. thanks for the info

Red Pocket is good because they provide service on all of the major networks (not at once - you pick which one when you sign up). They also have a deal at the moment where the first month is only $5 regardless of plan - but as draver mentioned above you'll get much better prices for their plans on eBay than via their website.

I've been using Mint Mobile (T-mobile network) and am more than happy with it. $15/month for 3GB data plus unlimited everything (or $20/8GB, $25/12GB), although to get those prices beyond the first 3 months you do need to pay 12 months in advance. (Data on all plans is unlimited at the moment due to covid, but no idea how long that will last). If anyone wants a referral code for $15 off then PM me.

Given this is flyertalk, the most important thing to remember with these MVNO's is that their international services are generally very limited/non existent. Visible doesn't do roaming at all (not even to Canada), nor does Red Pocket on their normal plans. Mint do, but data is 20 cents/MB for most of the world, with Canada a little cheaper at 6c/MB. Even if you think you can use a local SIM, having no coverage at all means no SMS messages for things like 2FA which can be a real issue. I've traveled internationally with Mint + a Three UK SIM with cheap global data and it was a good mix, but not for everyone.

It'll be interesting to see where the various MVNO's end up post the T-mobile/Sprint merger. One of the big advantages Google Fi had was the ability to use both of those networks (on select phones) giving much better coverage than either of them individually, but one would presume that before too long we start to see roaming enabled between T-Mobile and Sprint as the first step of the two networks merging - but it's not clear if that benefit will go to the MVNO's as well or just actual T-Mobile/Sprint customers.

A side note... I wanted a additional phone for my mother but was denied by Visible.

Chat said only one phone (service) per email account.

I have used Visible.

One thing which is a bit misleading for Visible and other MVNO's. Visible highlights the fact that they use the Verizon network. What they don't tell you is that your data is deprioritized. So depending how busy your local tower is, you can get really fast speeds (over 100 mbps) - or really slow speeds (around 1 mbps.) Anyone seriously thinking of going to Visible should browse through the Visible subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Visible/

Good tip. Reddit has 2 (at least) main Visible groups. One for how to get and maintain the $25 payment plan
and the other for everything else, tech support, porting, Google Voice integration, etc.

Lots of useable info in both.

Deprioritized speeds applies to the prepaid bands of the now Big 3 with some of their plans having speed caps.

With a Verizon business account, I often see <1Mbps speeds. Are you sure that's not just Verizon's network? I switched half of our office over to T-Mobile back in late 2015 due to how bad Verizon's network had gotten and haven't looked back. I'd have to Google to find T-Mobile's tech support line. It's been years since I've called it. I have Verizon's memorized.

No, I didn't have a postpaid Verizon phone side by side with a Visible phone to compare. I do know that there are some places where I get slow speeds during working hours, and fast speeds after everyone goes home from the area.

Anyone have info regarding ways to improve the Visible cell signal?

Along the lines of a booster, fem-to-cell, etc.

I use a weBoost by Wilson Signal Booster to increase my reception when driving through west Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. The service area for Visible may not be the same as Verizon post paid since Verizon has agreements with companies such as Bluegrass in Kentucky. LTE in Rural America which applies to some Verizon spectrum eliminated most coverage issues with Verizon MVNO's.
.

I left Verizon about 2.5 years ago due to this exact issue. Support blamed the phone, the area, etc. but couldn't explain why multiple phones in multiple major metro areas in multiple states were all the same.

Ultimately I got fed up with paying for a premium service but not getting it. I've been happy with T-Mob, and have had no major service gaps except for 1 area in NW Texas. For the weekend that I had to be out there and had to have service, I activated Google Fi on my e-sim and coverage from US Cellular filled the gap nicely.

It's interesting to hear that the speed situation on Big Red has not changed one bit.

I just signed up for Visible myself to use as a "Data only" line to compliment my Google FI service via a Dual-sim (esim) setup. Moved my primary number (FI) to the eSim, and am using the Visible SIM for data only. In this context I think it should work quite well. That said, I spend most of my days on wifi, but when I'm out and about I go through a decent amount of data.

Furthermore, here in Cleveland, Verizon seems to do a better job of building penetration than T-Mo. We'll see how it works out. Impressed so far. Have been getting ~78-100mbps down and ~30-50mbps up while gallivanting around the eastern Cleveland suburbs. Latency is a bit higher (around 100-160ms) I have yet to test video calling.

At $25 a month it is a great deal IMO. Their killer feature is the "Party Pay" concept. Where you join loosely coupled groups of 4 people, but you don't need to know them and billing is all separate. If you go to reddit, you can join or post a "Party" and get your rate down to $25 near instantly.
https://www.reddit.com/r/VisiblePartyPay/

Reviving a thread. I'm going to try Visible here in Silicon Valley/Peninsula and see what I get. I currently have post-paid T-Mobile Magenta regular for $20/month so that's a great deal, but T-Mobile seems to have gone downhill (I'll blame Sprint). The service inside my one-story wood-framed abode is 0-15 up and 0-1. The up is particularly pathetic. I'm glad I have very speedy cable - WiFi. I'm going to take a guess and say Visible has better overall coverage and maybe more even speeds even if T-Mobile may be a lot faster if the reception is good. I can tell when reception is poor when Siri in Carplay doesn't work or says something along the lines of couldn't do that/try again.