the Achilles heel of a Verizon MVNO carrier

I’m generally happy with US Mobile, as described in this post.  My current stay in Quartzsite reveals a perfect storm that has real effects

  1. Economic factor:  NOs resell excess carrier capacity at a discount.  This discount means that MVNO customers are prioritized lower than native carrier customers who pay full price.  Fair is fair.

  2. Network coverage factor:  many/most nomads use Verizon because of the extensive network.

  3. Proximity factor:  since Verizon is so popular with nomads, if you get a lot of them in one place the Verizon network will be hammered, even for full-price customers

  4. Result:  under those conditions Verizon MVNO customers will have severely limited bandwidth.

I aggressively conserve bandwidth (a habit left over from modem days?) and even then I’m struggling to get normal text-based stuff done.  I can’t load the regular gmail page consistently, and am using the slimmer HTML version.  Voice doesn’t load most of the time;  it seems to be a bit of a pig on the desktop.

Note:  last time I was in Q (RTR 2019, IIRC), I was running an AT&T mvno.  Coverage wasn’t as good  in the boonies but I was fine in town here where Verizon was crippled.  AT&T just wasn’t popular enough to get congested.

It will likely take a few attempts to get this post up on the blog due to timeouts and errors – here goes…

Updated: