I’ve been using AT&T as my cellular service provider for over twenty years — back when it was Cingular. At that time I was still on my mom’s plan, but have since moved to a family plan with my — at the time girlfriend and now — wife, Becky.
The service with AT&T was always quite good, albeit a bit expensive. For a while we stuck with them because we were still on old legacy unlimited plans from back when unlimited wasn’t just a marketing term. We have since switched to their newer unlimited plans in order to save a bit of money, but the amount we pay for cellular service was still too darn high.
We probably should have switched years ago, but didn’t out of laziness combined with the daunting task of figuring out which provider was best and how to port our phone number to a new carrier.
But Becky recently left her job to focus on the family and homeschooling. Now that we have a single income, there’s a bit more motivation to actually figure this stuff out and move to something more economical.
I didn’t do a ton of research to figure out which provider was best. Instead, I remembered that Michael Tsai had recently moved to US Mobile, so that’s where I looked first.
What I found about US Mobile was impressive. They’re an MVNO that let’s you choose which backend network you want to use for your devices — AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon, which they refer to as Dark Star, Light Speed, and Warp, respectively. And you can actually switch which network you use on the fly. You can do that for free a couple of times, depending on the plan, but it’s otherwise a nominal $2 fee.
In our area, AT&T provides far better coverage than T-Mobile or Verizon. But we take a yearly roadtrip through rural Pennsylvania where Verizon would actually serve us better. We might take advantage of the ability to switch networks for this — switching to the Verizon-backed network before we leave and then returning to AT&T’s backend after we arrive back home.
I also liked that US Mobile was pretty upfront about the priority level that you could expect for your data when using their service. If you click to see “More plan details” from their Plans page you can see that, depending on the plan, you end up with either QCI 8 or 9 when using AT&T/Dark Star.
I knew that one of the downsides with MVNOs was that you would often have lower priority traffic compared to the major carriers. But after doing a bit of research into the plan we had with AT&T, I found that we could get the exact same priority level with US Mobile’s Unlimited Premium plan, which is the one I had my eye on already.
Here’s just a highlight of some of the differences between AT&T’s Unlimited Extra EL plan, which we had been using and US Mobile’s Unlimited Premium plan:
- US Mobile doesn’t appear to throttle after a certain amount of data usage, compared to AT&T saying they “may” do so after 75GB.
- US Mobile offers unlimited hotspot data, throttling after 100GB. AT&T “may” throttle after 40GB.
- US Mobile is just $299 per line for the first year then it renews at $390 per line per year. Compared to the $164 per month we had been paying AT&T for two lines.
Switching seemed like a no-brainer at this point.
Even at the increased renewal cost after the first year, we’ll still be saving about $99 per month compared to what we were paying AT&T and without any downside that I can see.
I ported my number from AT&T to US Mobile yesterday. My plan was to go through that process with my phone and test it out before moving Becky over next week.
I had a brief snafu getting the US Mobile eSIM working on my iPhone. Apparently I needed to delete the AT&T eSIM before I could get the US Mobile one to activate, but that wasn’t documented anywhere that I saw. However, a quick chat with their online support had me sorted in about 15 minutes.
Since then, everything has been great. No issues of note at all.
As a bit of an aside, US Mobile does something pretty neat with the carrier identification flag that’s shown on your device. Since you can switch between the three networks with their service, they display the associated marketing name of the network you’re connected to. So now I have the text “Dark Star” in my iPhone’s upper-left corner. That’s kind of neat, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Assuming I don’t run into any unexpected surprises, I’ll be switching Becky over to US Mobile early next week.
And I may end up recommended the service to some family members as well. The pricing they offer for some of their plans is impressive. Including a Light Plan that gives you 2GB of data and unlimited talk and text for just $10 per month or $96 per year. I have a couple of family members that could probably save a bundle switching to this plan with, seemingly, no downside compared to what they have now.
It’s still early days, but I’m very happy with US Mobile so far.
