Unlocked eSIM phone saved the day

I am a long time AT&T user. Going back many, many years I was with Cingular Wireless which merged with AT&T and I stuck with them. Then the iPhone came out and it was AT&T only so I stuck with them. Then the iPhone went to Verizon but the tech was different. This was in the old TDMA/CDMA days. When I got married, my wife was on Verizon. Now we were never without coverage because between both networks, we were good. So I just stayed with AT&T. To be clear, there came a point with the maturity of the big networks, that my loyalty wasn’t to AT&T as much as it was to myself given the switching costs (financial and hassle).

In January of 2022, I moved two NJ towns over from where I was living previously and I did it sans-wife (this matters). Those 2 towns (westward) means I’m just a little more mountainous and a little more wooded with a little less service. It’s also time for 5G as I moved. As many know, 5G’s rollout has been spotty at best.

I found the spots in my house with lousy service and avoid them or leave my phone in a known good spot and roam the house with one of many pairs of Bluetooth headsets. Yesterday morning (12/18/22) I woke up to “SOS Only” on my iPhone. Weird. Cycled cellular. Same. Cycled airplane mode. Same. Rebooted the phone, reset the network settings. Same, same. Time to make a Genius Bar appointment for 4 hours later.

3 Hours, 4o minutes later I step outside — BOOM! Service. My bars light up like a Christmas Tree. Then disappear, then come back. Better go to the appt. Phone passes all test. I have service the whole way home. Enter my home. Dead again! It’s the phone. Transfer my eSIM to my iPhone 13 Pro Max (this has all been on my iPhone 14 Pro Max). Same result. My house has become a lead box overnight?

I go outside on my porch — service. I go inside-no service. This repeats a few times with the 13. Repeatable within 3–4 seconds. Transfer back to the 14. Same results. That’s it. My phone is shot when inside the house. My father comes over with his iPhone on Verizon. Signal throughout the house.

Despondent, I resign myself to no phone calls while home for a year until I can swap my phone. Then it hits me. I’m not financing through AT&T. I bought the phone outright from Apple. It’s unlocked. It’s eSIM.

I drove to Verizon — a corporate store, NOT an authorized retailer. I tell him I’m switching to Verizon on the spot. Here are the details.

He needed:

• My phone number — easy
• Account number — easy
• Transfer PIN — turns out to be easy (dial *7678 and they text you one)

Quick aside: When troubleshooting earlier that day I tried to log into my AT&T account, which I do once every never. They needed to confirm my identity. They have one method — texting a code. I can’t get texts and they don’t do email, 2FA/MFA, push, etc.

He gives me the rundown:

• Unlimited text and talk (as if that matters in 2023-ish)
• Unlimited data (AT&T wasn’t unlimited for years and I didn’t care because I’m mostly on WiFi, but this is still better)
• 25GB tethering (when AT&T brought back unlimited, it wasn’t with tethering)
• $13.88 off my bill for 36 months since I brought my own device
• $10 off my bill per month for auto pay
• $10 off my bill per month for being a veteran
• Free Disney+, ESPN+, HULU+ as long as I keep a qualifying account (spoiler alert: there are no non-qualifying accounts even worth having)

The process was simple. I handed him the 3 things mentioned above and he ran away for under 5 minutes and came back with a printed sheet of the details above and told me I was done. No credit card. No on the spot payment.

The way it works is that it all gets submitted to a number porting company. It’s a clearinghouse to make sure the transfer goes through. You stay on AT&T until Verizon claims the number and service, in theory. In actuality, the moment AT&T gets the request, it cuts off your service. Not their customer, not their problem. However, it takes about an hour for your new number and account to propagate through Verizon’s systems and the clearinghouse to release the number. So, I went back to no service for about an hour thanks to AT&T’s spite over losing a customer since 1999. But, hey, I had service with them, then I had partial service with them, then I had no service with them. And I had no way to get in touch. And were they going to reconfigure a local network segment for me? No.

The key here was that I also couldn’t grant final access to Verizon because I had no signal. The Indiana Jones trade off of a bag of sand for the golden idol went less smoothly for me than it did for Indy, and it wasn’t great for him either. As soon as I hit WiFi again, I did the final activation through Verizon. I’ve been up and running since then with stellar signal. I had to reboot the phone once to finalize iMessage registration and a couple other things, but Verizon made this a piece of cake. AT&T caused it and made it difficult in the process.

If I had financed the phone through AT&T I would have had to pay of it before I could do it. Even without owning the device but financing through Apple I would have been able to make this switch. You don’t buy your TV through your cable company. You don’t buy your stove through your gas company. Why buy your phone through your provider. Apple makes the phone, I buy it from Apple (insert manufacturer of choice here). AT&T (now Verizon) provides the signal. I get the device from the device manufacturer and I get the signal from the signal provider. And this gave me the freedom to make the switch spur of the moment at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon. I was in the Verizon store maybe 25 minutes which included the wait time, explanation time, and getting my transfer PIN from AT&T.

The commoditization of service means we should all retain switching freedom. There’s no reason not to. As of this event and writing, I’m on the job hunt. Imagine spending all day Monday trying to weasel out of a contract and missing interviews just to fix a phone problem so I can take more interviews. Or… you switch carriers like I did. Truthfully, I could have done it all from my phone in my living room with a handful of taps but I wasn’t sure how and didn’t want to risk it. Seeing the process after the fact tells me there was no risk in the first place.

I’m now set up with quality service, better battery life (low signal and a searching phone eats battery), better speeds, $12/month cheaper bill, and the Disney trio of services for $0 extra. All because my phone device bill and service bill are no longer inextricably linked like the old days.

That was a remarkable learning event in how I structure ownership of products/services and the providers of them. Consider making this switch and future proofing yourself from these monolithic service providers!