boerne

TGarza

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.

Dubai Stu

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

jerryss

freQ

mcgahat

"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/

James Moore

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.

docbert

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.

bukzin

Where your issues coverage or something else?

Did you ever give it a second look?

docbert

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.

TGarza

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

bukzin

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

bukzin

Do you have a link to that comparison?

boerne

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

TGarza

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.