Verizon’s Visible customers are missing calls, texts, and data after plan “upgrades”

Final week, Verizon’s budget-focused service Seen announced some sweeping changes, introducing new plans that make the most of a wholly totally different community infrastructure. The service instructed prospects that in the event that they selected to improve, they’d get higher roaming protection and latency in addition to further options in the event that they sprung for the $45 a month Seen Plus plan.

Opinions amongst those that have efficiently upgraded or signed up appear to be largely positive — most report seeing better speeds and significantly improved latency. (Although there are a few who say they don’t really notice any difference between the legacy plan and the brand new one.) However for a lot of different prospects, the swap has been fraught with service and buyer help points.

One of the frequent complaints amongst individuals on the Seen subreddit is an absence of service after upgrading. A few say they didn’t have any service in any respect after signing up. (One consumer humorously quipped, “Fortuitously, between the referral bonus and a Chase bank card provide, I successfully paid $0 for that month of [Visible Plus] service, so I can safely say I bought what I paid for.” Extra frequent, although, are experiences of semi-working service. Several users report that they’re in a position to textual content and make calls however can’t use data; others report having data however no calls or texts. There are even a stunning variety of individuals saying they will ship texts, make calls, and use information, however they aren’t receiving incoming calls.

Verizon didn’t instantly present The Verge’s with a touch upon the problems prospects are going through.

Some individuals haven’t been in a position to get to the purpose the place they’d know in the event that they have been having service points, as they’ve run into points attempting to get their telephones activated after popping within the new SIM card that the plan requires (or after downloading the eSIM). One person mentioned their cellphone nonetheless didn’t activate even after Seen help mentioned the problem was mounted.

Not everyone seems to be having the identical improve expertise.

That brings us to a different frequent grievance: several individuals say they’ve needed to spend hours talking to or waiting on Seen help employees, sometimes to no avail. Whereas there are simply as many individuals saying they bought an excellent help expertise, it looks like Seen’s struggled with constant communication through the launch. The day the brand new plans have been introduced, somebody posted a message from customer support that urged Seen was planning to drive everybody onto the brand new plans beginning on January 1st, 2023. Different commenters mentioned they’d been instructed the identical factor. Nevertheless, Seen denied that was the case, saying it plans to let individuals keep on the legacy Seen Limitless plan for so long as the underlying infrastructure stays out there.

This can be the place Seen’s position as Verizon’s price range service comes into play. In contrast to the mainline service’s prospects, Seen customers can’t stroll right into a retailer and hand a tech their cellphone. Visible’s support site says you might be able to speak to somebody on the cellphone however solely after you attain out by way of chat. Not having bodily areas is comparatively frequent for price range carriers (renting retail area is dear, in spite of everything), however the upshot is that individuals have been ready for hours and even days for assist that would only take a minute or two in person.

In some methods, it’s straightforward to see how this mess occurred. Verizon isn’t merely altering the pricing construction of its plans and calling it a day. The brand new plans use a totally totally different “core community routing expertise,” as Visible’s announcement post put it. The previous Seen Limitless plan used what has come to be referred to as the cloud core, which routed visitors by way of quite a lot of virtualized providers, according to Light Reading. The brand new plans, nevertheless, are a part of what Seen calls its network evolution, which modifications “how and the place” customers join. The change appears to make Seen’s community much more like Verizon’s, giving customers entry to roaming, premium information (in the event that they pay for it), and decrease latency.

Whereas strong technical particulars are sparse, it’s clear that Seen is making some huge modifications right here — the truth that you want a brand new SIM to change and that not each gadget that labored on the previous plan will work on the brand new ones drives that time residence. And large modifications often (though not always) include glitches for early adopters, particularly with issues as complicated as cell networks. However hopefully Seen will get issues discovered quickly or a minimum of improves its help for individuals who do run into points.

Till it does, as a Seen buyer myself, I’ll be sticking with my $25 a month legacy plan. On condition that it’s cheaper, is at the moment nonetheless working completely advantageous, and comes with lots of the similar advantages afforded by the brand new plans, it’s not that troublesome of a call.