Let’s talk Phone Plans !

Back to my roots…. Did you know that I spent 10 years slinging phones after I got out of the Navy ? I worked for Nextel which then became Sprint, followed by Cingular which then became AT&T, I spent a short time at Cricket Communications which switched from CDMA (Verizon affiliation more on that later) to I believe they use T-mobile now, and then I spent many MANY years working for Verizon. One day a lady walked in with a laptop that needed an Air Card replacement and it happened to be the day My Grandmother passed and I was just trying to get out of there I had like an hour left on my shift needed the distraction so I fixed that laptop to the best of my ability. I couldn’t have known she happened to be the Director of HR at an IT company and lets just say that started a new chapter of its own – although I am fairly Certain Gram and God were in on that one. ANY WAY, I know some stuff about phones and carriers and plans, so I will share with you my thoughts who I use today and why.

BTW have you noticed the Bog is back ! Yeah… ADUBZcrib is back on the air after several years of silence. We are an actual legal Florida Business now !! ADUBZcrib llc, we will be offering IT consulting services and website design work, digital media creation, social media network promotion and lots of other services! I went back and purged the database of ALL the many years previous posts, and I am re-launching this website with a new purpose. Going forward you will see Blogs posted about useful knowledge I wish to share with the world on practical things 🙂 There will be a lot more to come. Today let’s talk Phone Plans – and Spoiler alert – I am NOT going to have the iPhone / Android debate with you. I own both. I use both. Both have their place. You do YOU on that one, this blog will be about the carriers that power them and the suggestion I have to get the best bang for your buck. Or at least what I have found works best for me….

So if you want to read no further and simply want my recommendation, here it is. I use Visible. Visible is a Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Verizon ( this is important and sets it apart from Verizon Affiliates, I’ll explain later ). If you wanna jump strait to it – use my referral code we both get a $20 credit : https://www.visible.com/get/?3RTD7Q6

Visible Plans Look like this:

• UNLIMITED DATA. not Capped, not Throttled, not restricted to xxGB ….. Watch Netflix 24X7 if you want you will never hit a data cap and be throttled !
• UNLIMITED Hotspot. Basic – you get 1 device capped at 5mb/s. Visible+ you get one device capped at 10mb/s. Pro – you get one device capped at 20mb/s. You can only tether one device at a time and although your phone has no data caps the hotspot does so keep this in mind.
  
  What’s the catch ? Too good to be true !!! Well there is one, it’s all about data de-prioritization. I like to call it ” all you can eat at a mediocre buffet ” So Here’s the Gist, Cell phone towers can make connections to thousands of devices at once and they prioritize some of them over others for various reasons. For instance if someone dials 911 the tower will IMMEDIATELY focus all of its attention on that person it will drop other peoples calls if it has to, that 911 call gets immediate top priority. The same goes with emergency first responders. If a Police officer is using the tower they would also be top priority. So then the tower organizes the rest of the people connected to it in tiers of priority, first you have Post paid customers (people with regular plans provided by the carrier who owns the tower) and those are prioritized by size like if you have a company phone and your company has 50,000 lines on its plan the tower is gonna put you at the top of that list over billy down the street with only 2-3 lines. Then the bottom tiers you have PRE-Paid Customers also prioritized in tiers of network – so here’s the thing to know. Verizon owns the biggest network in our county they are the oldest they are the biggest hands down I don’t care what you see on TV commercials any time your phone talks to a tower regardless of who your service provider is chances are its a Verizon Tower. But Verizon got SMART way back in the beginning and signed all these roaming agreements with all the other carriers which have all changed names today but Still in place thats how you have like TracPhone and all these other random things popping up they are just simply reselling other carriers service they buy in Bulk primarily Verizon. And so this traffic is your bottom feeders on the tower all the Prepaid people. But guess who gets put at the top of THAT list… VISIBLE. why ? Because Verizon OWNS Visible. It’s not some random company reselling Verizon service it IS Verizon they OWN it – it’s a wholly owned subsidiary OF Verizon. so – naturally they are gonna prioritize their own over everyone else who signs roaming agreements….

So What does this actually mean ? ….. Ok so lets say you are sitting on a park bench watching TikTok videos and doing all the things you do and so video streaming takes a considerable amount of bandwidth depending on compression algorithms used and how much of each frame is change data ( I can write an entire blog about that on its own ) suffice it to say it takes a decent amount of bandwidth. SO if you are on one of the bigger carriers say T-mobile Verizon Sprint and you and or your family have reached your data allowance for the month your gonna get throttled and that video will buffer and or fail to load. But you look around and there’s no one near you, your in a park on a bench in a remote rural area the tower you are connected to is probably yawning at you so what gives ? its the data cap imposed by your carrier and THATS where Visible shines because on that same park bench you can consume terabytes of data at speeds upwards of 500Mb/s due to the simple fact that the tower is not that busy your in a rural area and no one else is really utilizing it. On the flip side – here’s the catch. If you find yourself at a major sporting event or rock concert or something where you are surrounded by other people streaming video live on FB and taking pictures (their phones are backing photos and videos up to the cloud even if they aren’t streaming) they are overloading the towers in your proximity and you are de-prioritized THATs the tradeoff with using Visible. There are times especially in congested areas and ESEPECIALLY at sporing events or concerts where everyone has their phones out that your gonna get barely any bandwidth at all. But how often do you find yourself in that sort of situation and is it worth the exorbitant cost of paying 100’s of dollars per month for phone service only to be capped on an “unlimited plan” because you or someone else in your family used up all your data ?

Personally I have the PRO plan because I also have an Apple Watch and it includes Apple Watch service for free – I pay the one and done $450 once a year and both my phone and my watch get lightning fast LTE 5Guw Verizon coverage 99.999% of the time unless I am at some rock concert or for what ever reason the towers where I happen to be standing are overloaded, I don’t see any slow downs. and I don’t pay any monthly fees for my phone just one bill once per year and its over with.

Now here’s another fun fact about Verizon Roaming agreements. Verizon also shares other carriers towers – about 30% of Verizons network isn’t really Verizon towers. So if you use Verizon itself ( or Visible ) you get to use this additional 30% of the network where as companies like tracphone who run on Verizon but are not owned by Verizon they can only use the 70% of the network that Verizon actually owns because Verizon cannot re-lease towers that they are leasing from other carriers. Well they probably could but there would be no money it for them so why would they.

So there ya have it…. Go get Visible keep your phone or buy a new one they have affiliations with affirm you can make monthly payments or just keep the one you got. Use my referral link we both get a $20 credit :). https://www.visible.com/get/?3RTD7Q6

Stay safe out there! I look forward to writing a number of blog posts on all kinds of useful subjects everything from how to secure your Facebook account to using MFA and best practices on backups and securing your data, encryption, password safety and tons of things to come… (we will also soon be overhauling this website with a brand new look.) “we” are working on it in the background, remember there are two A W’s hence the name :). Maybe I can talk her into writing the next blog post for you….

-Andrew

P.S. Im an apple kid 😛