Almost Free No Data Caps Internet T.V. And Movies

[Sofi]

UPDATE: Visible continued my $25 plan for 2023. Just paid my January $25 bill. Hopefully, it will stay that way for those who with the old plan.

The $25 party pay is locked in (grandfathered at $25). Any new connections will be $30.

 

[Cagey]

I don't get why cagey bought another plan to get $25 per month. If legacy people don't, will the price go up to $30 now?

...

They say the upgrade gives faster more reliable network.

My reasoning:
For the same $ per month, I get:

1. Coverage: probably better.
2. Latency: almost certainly better.
3. Speed: I expect same to slightly better.
4. Network: Visible Unlimited (legacy) uses a Visible-specific "network core", not Verizon's. This (a key part of what differentiated Visible at its inception) is apparently being sunsetted, which was the motivation for Verizon creating the new Visible plans which use the Verizon network core, and only accepting new Visible customers on those plans. It seems likely that the legacy Visible network core is already a lame duck (has minimal resources assigned to its maintenance and will receive no upgrades).

These benefits were not worth an extra $5 per month to me, but are worth $0 extra per month. Also I can trailblaze for DW who is also on Visible Unlimited and has recently been complaining about voice-call availability and quality.

Unlimited data [, text, voice], unlimited 5Mbps hotspot, and $0 in taxes and extra fees remain the same. I use a 5G-capable device (Pixel 5) and in my understanding the same 5G service I've been increasingly leveraging on the legacy plan will remain available on the low-tier Visible plan I'll be moving to (I've not perceived 5G to offer any great benefit (certainly the "extra fancy 5G" on the $45/month plan is not something I care about), but I lose nothing in terms of 5G across this change).

Edit: according to my reading on Reddit (and my IMEI checks) the one possible negative of this change is whether a given phone which was "working fine" on the legacy network will work on the Verizon network. There's a very useful "[PSA] Legacy migration info" post on r/Visible which suggests that Verizon's IMEI checker is both more accurate and more permissive than Visible's; that Visible's is slowly being brought up to date with Verizon's, but in the meantime, Visible's false negatives can sow doubt. My phone passes both IMEI checkers, but DW's fails Visible's (which is ironic because she's been on Visible for 1.5 years with almost uniformly great service).

 

[Cagey]

New Visible SIM received & activated minutes ago. Chat via Visible app was required post-activation to get the connection working; it took maybe 5 minutes including a second SIM remove+reinsert cycle.

The only quantifiable difference observed thus far is that, as expected, ping (using Google Chrome Speed Test) has gone from 60 mS on the legacy plan to 45 mS on the new plan. My connection is still using 5G.

 

[RVTravel]

Interesting about the SIM remove+reinsert cycle. I have not heard that one in "fixing" problems.

 

[Cagey]

Interesting about the SIM remove+reinsert cycle. I have not heard that one in "fixing" problems.

I don't think it was so much that that action fixed anything per se but rather that it power-cycled (reset) my SIM card after the Visible chat rep had reprogrammed it (and altered their back end's configuration) while my phone remained connected to WiFi (as the SIM activation instructions require), thus not dropping my Visible-app-(on my phone)-based support chat session. I found it noteworthy that I was directed to hot un-/re-plug the SIM; in the past I had always turned off my phones before messing with their SIM (and microSD) cards.