scurvy
New member
While I have a work-paid cell phone on AT&T and my wife has a PAYG plan on a T-Mobile MVNO, we needed additional data capabilities when camping with the whole family so I started looking into Verizon. Their direct costs were very high and I had a bad experience some decades ago with their billing, but their coverage is arguably the best out there. However there are providers that are on their network but at a much lower cost - a Mobile Virtual Network Operator - and in this case it is called Visible. They offer "unlimited" calling, texts & data (including hotspot) for $40 a month, including all taxes and fees.
I tried a different Verizon MVNO with a 5GB/month plan but came to the conclusion it wasn't for us.
1. After taxes and fees the "$32" plan was actually $39.98
2. On our first trip out in the RV, we burned through 4.2GB of data in less than 24 hours! No way was 5GB good enough for a family of 4 for a month.
Besides showing my kids how to drop their quality from 1080p down to 480i on YouTube, we had to go unlimited.
Enter Visible. I signed up (first month is $25), ordered a free SIM kit which arrived in a day and started the process of porting the number away from Total Wireless which took another day. Put the SIM into an unused iPhone 8 and we were up and running.
And it worked great! During our 18 day trip, we used this much data, the vast majority via hotspot, without issue:
In fact, part of that was downloading a 15GB game onto a laptop that my daughter wanted for her birthday. I consistently saw download speeds in the 260kb/s - 1.5Mb/s range the entire time, inside a house with only two bars of service.
Not only that, you can join a "Party Pay" group with 4 other people which drops your monthly bill down to $25/month total. You aren't responsible for them or their devices or their billing or their phones. And you don't have to know them or be near them - there's an entire subreddit devoted to finding others to join your Visible Party Pay group ( https://www.reddit.com/r/VisiblePartyPay/ ). I signed up for one yesterday and our 2nd bill was just paid at $25.
Ignore the part that says you can hotspot a single device only - it's phone dependent. If you buy a phone from them it will be locked to that policy. I was using my old iPhone which allows up to 8 connections and we frequently had 6 devices connected.
The only caveat I have encountered is that it only works on Verizon's regular 4G coverage area. In Door County WI we had zero service on this device (while both our ATT & TMobile phone had a bit) - afterwards I discovered that these are part of the "expanded 4G" coverage. However throughout most of the Dakotas, Montana & Wyoming, we had great service on this phone with little or no service on the others.
I tried a different Verizon MVNO with a 5GB/month plan but came to the conclusion it wasn't for us.
1. After taxes and fees the "$32" plan was actually $39.98
2. On our first trip out in the RV, we burned through 4.2GB of data in less than 24 hours! No way was 5GB good enough for a family of 4 for a month.
Besides showing my kids how to drop their quality from 1080p down to 480i on YouTube, we had to go unlimited.
Enter Visible. I signed up (first month is $25), ordered a free SIM kit which arrived in a day and started the process of porting the number away from Total Wireless which took another day. Put the SIM into an unused iPhone 8 and we were up and running.
And it worked great! During our 18 day trip, we used this much data, the vast majority via hotspot, without issue:
In fact, part of that was downloading a 15GB game onto a laptop that my daughter wanted for her birthday. I consistently saw download speeds in the 260kb/s - 1.5Mb/s range the entire time, inside a house with only two bars of service.
Not only that, you can join a "Party Pay" group with 4 other people which drops your monthly bill down to $25/month total. You aren't responsible for them or their devices or their billing or their phones. And you don't have to know them or be near them - there's an entire subreddit devoted to finding others to join your Visible Party Pay group ( https://www.reddit.com/r/VisiblePartyPay/ ). I signed up for one yesterday and our 2nd bill was just paid at $25.
Ignore the part that says you can hotspot a single device only - it's phone dependent. If you buy a phone from them it will be locked to that policy. I was using my old iPhone which allows up to 8 connections and we frequently had 6 devices connected.
The only caveat I have encountered is that it only works on Verizon's regular 4G coverage area. In Door County WI we had zero service on this device (while both our ATT & TMobile phone had a bit) - afterwards I discovered that these are part of the "expanded 4G" coverage. However throughout most of the Dakotas, Montana & Wyoming, we had great service on this phone with little or no service on the others.