Looks like Venn Mobile is going bust. No service since early yesterday morning. Sprint Business customer service says there are legal proceedings underway. Reminds me of the last days of RingPlus.
Venn Support sent an e-mail yesterday saying it’s a company-wide outage. The e-mail was cc’ed to TelTik. Yesterday, Venn’s phone customer service said Venn’s business team was working on the issue. Note how they said “business team” and not “technical team”. Today, no one comes on the line and “the voice mailbox is full” so you can’t leave any messages.
If you are with Venn, disable auto-pay. They look like they are on their way out. Unfortunately for me, my credit card was charged just two days ago for next month.
I should have seen the signs. Data speeds were horrible. Frustratingly slow Chat. No replies to Support e-mails. Phone customer service consists of a husband-and-wife team that works from home. (I know this because there was this loud guy called Jay answering calls in the background when I called around the start of the Coronavirus pandemic, and the lady called Rochelle who I was talking to, said Venn was letting her work from home. I called again a couple minutes later and the guy called Jay answered, put me on to Rochelle, and continued talking loudly in the background. Jay is a huge loud-mouthed jerk incidentally. Keeps insulting customers).
I'm curious about your inclusion of Hello Mobile here.
Are you suggesting that Hello Mobile is using a business model similar to Venn & Teltik? (Reselling group business lines.)
Or are you suggesting only that Hello Mobile's pricing structure for data is not tenable? (Which may in fact be the root cause of Venn Mobile's demise, rather than the reseller issue.)
Or are you looking just at a prediction of the next MVNO to fail, without suggesting any similarities of the reason for failure? (i.e., Venn might fail because of average data use, Teltik might fail because of reseller method objections from a carrier, and Hello Mobile might fail because of poor customer service.)
Haha yes sorry I just think their pricing looks too good to be true. They are either doing something sketchy, not taking enough to survive long term or will jack up the prices later. Just a random prediction. The ones that seem too good to be true usually are.
They are offering $25 unlimited (even lowr for family plans). That simply is not sustainable for anyone other than a major carrier subsidising it for one reason or another or someone reselling group lines.
Thanks! Good observations, & I'm not sure I would disagree with them.
The last I read, Hello Mobile's $25 Unlimited plan was really 15GB at full speed, throttled 2G afterwards-- but pretty decent 2G, at 256kbps. That said, it still seems to fall under the 'too good' umbrella.
I have expected Hello's pricing to go up somewhat since they started. With a few exceptions (including that $25 plan, and before any multi-line discounts ), their rates are pretty close to Tello's rates.
I'll take a swipe at that one-- Visible is unsustainable at party-pay pricing. The only reason I can see for that rate is that it's still in beta & has the potential of significant issues that would drive folks away if they were paying closer to market price.
So, for those who long for Visible to get all the kinks ironed out & to become as reliable & easy as Verizon Postpaid/prepaid, be careful what you wish for. When that happens, there's no reason for bargain-basement pricing.
Well, Visible @ 4 lines for $100 is what many other post paid carriers offer on promo, so I am not sure that would be unsustainable, esp with cost/price of bandwidth continually going down...
Granted that there are multi-line discounts available to match Visible's price: And granted that their customer service overhead is low.
But, if I look at PrepaidCompare.net, the only other single-line, by-the-month unlimited high-speed plans that are less than twice Visible's Party-Pay price are Venn Mobile and Teltik (not a good argument for sustainable pricing there, right now), and Sprint's Kickstart.
Don't get me wrong-- I don't think Visible is at any risk of being unsustainable because of their pricing. I think their party-pay pricing is at risk of being unsustainable if they fix some of the vexing issues with service.
Visible is a flanker, though. They don't technically need to be profitable at any cost, because they effectively don't pay network costs. Who would Verizon pay them to, themselves?
Agreed, the network is a sunk cost and marginal cost is almost zero. I guess it's like Sprint Kickstart where they would throttle you during congestion periods.
Looks like Bluegreen mobile is out (scroll down to 6/26/2020).
IMPORTANT NOTICE: As of July 1, 2020, Bluegreen Mobile will be discontinuing our partnership with T-Mobile, and therefore will no longer be able to provide cellular service to our current customers. To avoid any interruption in your cellular service and to keep your current mobile number you MUST port your phone number to another mobile carrier by June 30, 2020. To do so, you will need to provide the new carrier with the following information: Current Phone number, Account Number, and PIN number which will be provided to you below. If you have prepaid for service past June 30, 2020 we will be issuing you a refund within the next 30 days.
I think Bluegreen has been on life support for some time.
Wing Alpha, another reseller, seems to be having issues in a quieter, more planned, way. Users have reported that their customers are being issued Net10 (Tracfone Group) SIM cards, and that they don't appear to be postpaid-equivalent plans anymore. (To be more precise, the SIMs may be from ClearWire, another Tracfone subsidiary aimed at business users.)
Whether or not Venn is failing because of not being able to pay for service, it kind of looks like a wide swath of business-plan resellers are going away. Perhaps there is more to this, as LiterallyUnlimited wondered.
Seems to be tmobile have shaken up its dealings and decided it doesn't want to deal with businesses like teltik, venn, wing etc Probably reviewed this as part of the merger reshuffle. Timing fits.