So, I’ve been a fan of Visible since they first started. It worked exceptionally well for the price. However, it seems that they have a very well planned roadmap that is still in progress.
The first step, we now realize, is to get the “Party” join feature to go viral, to get tons of interest in the product and the “discount” from being in a party.
After getting plenty of people hooked, they announced they were all but doing away with the party feature and at the same time they announced a new “premium” network tier that you could pay additional for. Strangely this coincided with my personally having all kinds of network issues, requiring regular network settings resets and phone restarts to fix the problems. Mind you, this is on an iPhone 13 Pro that I purchased from Visible.
So now they want people to pay a higher price to basically get what was promised from the beginning. 5G Ultra-Wideband is not necessary by any means to have a “premium” network experience. I’ve readily been able to demonstrate since having network issues, that by going through a VPN provider I would oftentimes get 10 times faster performance when downloading content. This was repeatable at various locations around the USA. My primary tests were done by downloading Audiobooks from the Audible app, and tested during peak times and off-peak times. I was well aware they would be “deprioritizing” the prepaid customers, that’s a given… However, mangling the traffic based upon the content wasn’t expected and definitely wasn’t appreciated. But, even when maintaining a VPN connection, I would lose service at regular intervals.
So, I finally decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to the “premium” network for the additional cost so I could evaluate it before deciding whether to move elsewhere. Immediately after submitting payment, my service stopped working. I luckily had a secondary eSIM active which allowed me to make calls and use data during this period, but in working with support, it took nearly 48 hours before my phone was operational again. There was no explanation given for this, and no compensation for it either. It’s the second time that my Visible service has been down for multiple days at a time.
I’m going to make another post about their “new customer” practices, particularly the number transfer aspect. Because I still refer customers to Visible, as it does work relatively well for most people the majority of the time, I’ve seen their onboarding process evolve and made some definitive observations about it over time.
If you’re interested, keep an eye out as I’ll be making this second post pretty soon after this one. If you have any experiences to share, please do make a comment as I’d like to hear it.
~Josh
