I mentioned that I had used US Mobile earlier as a cell phone provider company. I switched to them from Visible and wrote a post about that. Yesterday I helped move someone to that service, and it was frustrating.
First I should admit my own mistake. I forgot to take out the physical SIM and when you are going from physical SIM to eSIM that confuses the issue. I made that same mistake on my phone which I thought I would remember. This meant that the IMEI number was confused and I had to reset the IMEI number on the US Mobile webpage.
I also tried to do it using the US Mobile smartphone app but it wouldn’t let me complete the process. So after contacting customer service, they suggested I do it through the webpage. The webpage worked. However, there was a part of the process that was a problem and that is what I want to talk about. The part where I had to reset the IMEI number wouldn’t allow me because it was grayed out and unavailable.
The US Mobile customer service rep said that this was a technical bug and shouldn’t happen. He suggested using Chrome (I was using Brave) and try it again. I tried Chrome and the same behavior. I understand that trying a different browser is a valid troubleshooting technique. That isn’t a problem. What is a problem is that at this point he didn’t have any further suggestions to fix the issue. You can’t just leave a customer hanging like that.
It turns out that I had to enable MFA and then restart the browser to get the IMEI number selectable to change. Very silly process but it works.
Now it would be unfair for me to say that switching cell phone companies is an easy process. Both Verizon prepaid, Visible, Tmobile, AT&T, and every other cell phone provider I have had make switching hard. Part of switching is giving them your PIN, but when you port out, cell phone companies have a unique PIN that you need to find. In this case, Verizon prepaid service was closed and in this process, the unique PIN was texted to the phone number probably as a consequence of the result to port. In Visibile’s case, I had to find it on my customer support webpage.
All of this process took two hours when it took me originally 10 minutes to port over even with the incorrect PIN that was hidden from me. For that the Verizon cost went from $90 a month to $25 a month. Worth doing for sure. Just to be clear when I have switched cell phone providers in the past I have had problems switching over with physical SIM cards not being recognized or any other number of issues. With eSIM you can mostly fix them yourself as long as you have the right information from your old cell phone company.
It is worth doing and the more you do it, the easier it gets. Would I still recommend US Mobile? Yes. The savings and features are worth it to me.