I think that phone selection is critical to being happy with Visible Mobile.
That's why I'll always be sure to use a phone with a Mediatek processor so that I'll have easy access to LTE band selection.
(FYI: Android 10 removes radio access even for phones with Mediatek processors.)
Without any manipulation my phone automatically connected to LTE band 4 which, as you can see in the screenshot, below, is only offering dial-up speeds.
After testing each band, in succession, I chose band 5, for obvious reasons.
This may or may not be an issue in more urban environments but, in rural areas like mine, the ability to select the LTE band can make the difference between loving Visible and hating them.
Now to make sure that we do not get that upgrade forced on, so the ability to manually select bands remains intact.
Edit: If ever released
Edit 2: I also meant to say that for some reason I do also get the best performance on band 5 post the upgrade (provided the phone is outside the house). If not forced, it (the ZTE) will go between band 13 and 4 depending on the area I am at within the house. I have not even tried messing with the moto since that has been working satisfactory without any tweaking.
Interesting thanks Chelle. I wish more phones would let you have full access to LTE bands. Especially on sprint as I'd like to force tmobile access at home.
Recently during the visible upgrade my phone started to act strangely with LTE bands. Normally my visible phone would only lock onto band 4 and I would be seeing a strong signal and 40Mbps down. But for some reason I started getting band 5 primarily which had basically no signal and 1-2Mbps down or band 13 which was better at 8Mbps down. It looks like whatever they were doing has stopped now and my phone is back to connecting to band 4 like it should. So at least I know I am not missing out on anything on a different band.
Since Visible is LTE only, voice is VoLTE too so having APN as VSBLINTERNET is critical.
Now Visible is Ringplus next generation. They have a similar architecture - only instead of running on bare metal, they run on GCP and VZ Cloud.
Unfortunately, this means 2 things:
triple digit latency is here to stay
our traditional local switch based knowledge is now going to be challenged because due to realtime software switching, Visible can literally upload a new routing algorithm and break all existing knowledge/assumptions we have about the service.
For example, if Visible notices Chelle connects to B5 (850) too much so that the spectrum usage is skewed, they can blacklist the A3 IMEI on that specific band and Chelle will have no (except e911 aka LIMSERV mode) connectivity.
The ZTE Blade A3 Prime has Android 10 and is still able to have its LTE bands selected and deselected. So the information that I read, several months back, is incorrect.
I wasn't actually holding it in my hand. It was a friend in Iowa and he installed LTE Discovery, Speedtest by Ookla, and MTK Engineering Mode by TheMonster while we talked on the phone.
I explained to him that this was his "tech toolbox" and walked him through the use of each app. I was very curious if MTK would work and he was able to follow each one of my instructions until we found the fastest band.
If MTK Engineering Mode hadn't worked he wouldn't have been able to find BandMode and SIM1 in the menu tree.
Next time I talk to him I'll try to get him to send me screenshots.
I just got off the phone with a Visible engineer and we both concluded that the Verizon tower near us is malfunctioning.
This might yet salvage my reputation, I will find out.
The only concern I have is that I would have expected Verizon to figure out that a tower of their's was malfunctioning all week but the debugging processes we went through were thorough. The only remaining possibilities are that Visible's coverage map is grossly wrong or the towers near me are heavily congested with higher priority traffic.
I am looking for Verizon SIM cards that are not Visible to gain some insight into this.
