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