Observation about Visible cell service

[rgG]

I had the regular $25/month plan that visible offers.
I have recently been visiting an area where I would get 5G showing on my iPhone, but the service was generally slow for web browsing, email and such.
My daughter has postpaid Verizon and had no issues, same phone, so she was obviously getting prioritized.
The town where we are is small, but heavily uses Verizon, as for a LONG time it was the only cell service that offered coverage. I can imagine there is more traffic here, than you would think, because of it being heavily Verizon.
Anyway, I got an email saying the Visible upgrade plan was again on sale for $35/month, so I decided to try it.
After a restart, I was immediately getting MUCH faster downloads. It was like night and day.

So, you do get throttled by Visible on the basic plan, if there is heavy traffic, and the first 50GB of data on the upgrade plan seems to not get throttled. I haven’t used nearly my 50GB, so can’t speak to what it’s like after that.

Just thought I would post my real world experience, in case anyone was interested.

[d4]

I'm on the Visible $20 basic plan ($20/24mo.) Although not as snappy as when I'm on WiFi, it's fine for my purposes. Waze, voice calls, texts, email, and non-video news. Coming from a household with 3 Visible plans (soon to be 4 Visible plans) I can live with the throttle for a bit of savings

Before upgrading, it would've been interesting to see the results of a side-by-side speed comparison on Fast.com.

[graylocks]

i travel a lot and found myself in some areas where the basic service was not enough. one time in nashville during rush hour the gps was basically unusable. the upgrade was on sale so i took it and things have been fine in the past year since. $35 unlimited everything ain’t too shabby.

[macphanatic]

Verizon 15GB prepaid plan is $35/month. Unless one uses a lot of data, I would steer towards Verizon over Visible prepaid.

[graylocks]

macphanatic wrote:
Verizon 15GB prepaid plan is $35/month. Unless one uses a lot of data, I would steer towards Verizon over Visible prepaid.

when i travel i hotspot my iphone 11 from my iphone 14 using it exclusively for navigating. between that and streaming on the iphone 14 i easily use over 40gb a month. i’ve been home this month so have only used 1.5gb.

[Gareth]

rgG wrote:
So, you do get throttled by Visible on the basic plan, if there is heavy traffic...

Yup, I noticed the same. Put up with it for a year since I was on a $15/mo special, but after that I switched to Mint, so we'll see how that is. I also didn't like the 5Mbps throttling when using hotspot on Visible. As I understand it, on a Mint "fixed" data plan, hotspot will run at "full speed" (as long as you're within your data allotment).

[macphanatic]

graylocks wrote:
[quote=macphanatic]
Verizon 15GB prepaid plan is $35/month. Unless one uses a lot of data, I would steer towards Verizon over Visible prepaid.

when i travel i hotspot my iphone 11 from my iphone 14 using it exclusively for navigating. between that and streaming on the iphone 14 i easily use over 40gb a month. i’ve been home this month so have only used 1.5gb.
Why don't you download maps for offline navigation? It should save a ton of data?

[Pat]

Could be your phone. All 5g phones and networks don't necessarily play nice with each other.
I have a retail Moto 5G Ace on Verizon but it's not the Verizon 5G Ace UW. Any time it connects to a Verizon 5g network, it's slow as molasses. That might be understating it, it's unusable. 4g works fine.

Since you only noticed it when the 5g showed up, it's a possibility that it's hardware related and not throttling.

Edit: Some phones allow you to turn off 5g, you could try that. If your speed comes back on 4g it's a hardware issue, if not you're being throttled.

[rgG]

Pat wrote:
Could be your phone. All 5g phones and networks don't necessarily play nice with each other.
I have a retail Moto 5G Ace on Verizon but it's not the Verizon 5G Ace UW. Any time it connects to a Verizon 5g network, it's slow as molasses. That might be understating it, it's unusable. 4g works fine.

Since you only noticed it when the 5g showed up, it's a possibility that it's hardware related and not throttling.

Edit: Some phones allow you to turn off 5g, you could try that. If your speed comes back on 4g it's a hardware issue, if not you're being throttled.

Daughter and I have exactly the same phone, so I don’t think that was the issue.
She had fast speeds and I had slow.

[Pat]

rgG wrote:

Daughter and I have exactly the same phone, so I don’t think that was the issue.
She had fast speeds and I had slow.

Sorry, I didn't see that info.