Heavily Deprioritized

Telecom
1

Visible might be inexpensive but Verizon appears to be devoting very little bandwidth to it.

I live in a small town where cell towers are never congested. I get good signal on all 4 networks (although AT&T isn't as strong as the others).

My T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint phones all get 15-20 Mbps, which is more than sufficient.

My Visible line gets 0.7 Mbps, during the day, and 2.0 Mbps from midnight to 6am, despite having 4 to 5 bars of signal.

If I had a consistent 1.5 Mbps I'd be perfectly content, but 0.7 is ridiculous.

Visible has "reset my data profile" blah blah blah and all the other behind the scenes things they can do but it's made no difference.

Visible is heavily deprioritized and that's exactly where Verizon wants it to be.

It's fine for surfing the web, YouTube videos, and watching Netflix, Prime or Sling, but most other video services won't run on that little bandwidth.

Forget about Hulu, Motortrend, Pluto, and other bandwidth-hungry streaming services.

2

Just tested mine here in Kansas City metro area. I got 7.51 down / 4.3 up / 99 ms latency.

3

I'm jealous!

4

I used to get 20Mbps+ all the time at home. I still get that often but with about 2Mbps when it hits the lowest. I've been seeing more of the 2Mbps during the day lately. With everything that is going on I think they are being heavily taxed right now. They probably got an influx of people wanting to take advantage of the unlimited data and you see more comments about using in a hotspot device, home internet etc. Unfortunately they are going to get abused in this situation which is bad news for us. You should be getting better speeds after midnight though.

5

I guess you might have a lot of Verizon post-paid users in that area. Thus huge de-prioritize for Visible users.

6

Wow, that's pretty bad. My download speeds have been normal for my area. Attached are some readings all using the Moto e6 on Visible. The two readings for February were one with the hotspot enabled (5 megabit cap) and the other without (Tampa Bay area) Now, the upload has been rather low inside the house. Thankfully, I have not have to use the hotspot for work purposes. Hope it all works out for you!

400×800 33.8 KB

7

Anyone reading this thread should look at my post about selecting LTE bands.

It turns out that deprioritization is not an issue. There are some LTE bands that are much slower than others and it all comes down to disabling those bands so that your phone only chooses from the faster bands.

I'm now enjoying consistent bandwidth of 12-14 Mbps and above.

8

Chelle, I would suggest deprioritization is very much the issue and you have figured out a way to work around it.

deprioritization works on a band level - its literally reducing your time to access the tower on the band so others can use it more than you.

This is what I think:

  1. You have a lot of Verizon postpaid customers in your area, but they are not using band 5 (band 13 (700) is primary, then 4 (1700) after all)
  2. You figured out a way to use B5 (850) and essentially work around deprioritization

Your connection quality will last as long as visible does not change their algorithm or band 5 in your area remains less crowded.

9

Any new comments on this topic?

10

I'm seeing much less of it.

11

I have a similar experience with Visible. The fastest speed I ever recorded was 3 Mbps but I'm usually below 1Mbps. When I hotspot to my laptop even browsing is slow. Probably going to let Visible expire at the end of the 30 days.

12

My experience has greatly improved since I wrote this.

I'm seeing increased bandwidth and lower latency (83ms instead of 130ms).

It's definitely not as good as Verizon postpaid but it's not bad and probably good enough for most people-- including me.

13

https://www.prepaidphonenews.com/2020/10/visible-launching-5g-service-under.html

14

I just figured out a way to consistently get really fast speeds on Visible, although it's applicability is very limited. I plugged in a Visible SIM into the A1723 Sprint unlocked version of the first generation iPhone SE. Unlike the A1662 version (and other iphones since the iPhone 6), the A1723 does not have LTE band 13. So it has to default to band 4. My band 4 coverage must be really good where I live (about 8 blocks from where all the mayhem happened 2 days ago!), so maybe this isn't a great solution for travel. However, my A1723 is a really good hotspot for where I live.

15

My ZTE A7 Prime lets me select and deselect any LTE bands I want.

When one band gets troublesome I just take it out of the mix.