Trying to switch to Mint Mobile (success?)

Jayne

Jayne

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I've ordered the starter kit from Mint Mobile, going to give it a try tomorrow. Switching from my AT&T plan that was just what I was rolled into when I left the corporate world.

Mint runs on AT&T, so the service should be the same at the house. Data is de-prioritized when the network is busy, but as long as I stay away from large crowds of people all trying to live stream nonsense I shouldn't notice. Staying away from lots of people is good advice even if you don't have cheap service.

It's $15/month for the 4GB plan, and I'm using under 1GB now so I should be fine even if I go crazy with the youtubes or crotchtok or whatever.

After the first 3 months (that you have to pre-pay) you can renew for 3/6/12 months. To keep the $15/month rate you have to pre-pay for 12 months. Pretty sure I can swing that once-a-year $200 charge (taxes and fees, yo) if it saves me long term; about a 70% reduction in my cell cost per year.

I'll update the thread after I try the activation and have tested data around town.
 
I was going to switch my cellphone to them, got the kit but it was missing the Sim. Tried to contact them for a week with no response, tossed the kit in the trash and kept giving my money to Verizon, who while being greedy bastards actually have people you can talk to when you have an issue.
 
Jayne said:
I've ordered the starter kit from Mint Mobile, going to give it a try tomorrow. Switching from my AT&T plan that was just what I was rolled into when I left the corporate world.

Mint runs on AT&T, so the service should be the same at the house. Data is de-prioritized when the network is busy, but as long as I stay away from large crowds of people all trying to live stream nonsense I shouldn't notice. Staying away from lots of people is good advice even if you don't have cheap service.

It's $15/month for the 4GB plan, and I'm using under 1GB now so I should be fine even if I go crazy with the youtubes or crotchtok or whatever.

After the first 3 months (that you have to pre-pay) you can renew for 3/6/12 months. To keep the $15/month rate you have to pre-pay for 12 months. Pretty sure I can swing that once-a-year $200 charge (taxes and fees, yo) if it saves me long term; about a 70% reduction in my cell cost per year.

I'll update the thread after I try the activation and have tested data around town.
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Tagged for interest. Let us know how it works out.
 
With it being on att and not actually att you mean nothing to att. Priority is att. I know a couple people with mint and there are times they show service but can't make a call.
 
NCLivingBrit said:
I was going to switch my cellphone to them, got the kit but it was missing the Sim. Tried to contact them for a week with no response, tossed the kit in the trash and kept giving my money to Verizon, who while being greedy bastards actually have people you can talk to when you have an issue.
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I'm using an iphone 12 mini so it's eSIM compatible, they're not actually shipping anything physical. But yea, if anything goes wrong I'm screwed. We're keeping the wife's phone on a real plan with another carrier so if something goes sideways we still have a cell phone around.
 
LeeMajors said:
With it being on att and not actually att you mean nothing to att. Priority is att. I know a couple people with mint and there are times they show service but can't make a call.
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I'm more worried about data than I am voice. I call exactly 1 person voice, everything else is text, signal, or innocaption (which I think is all data but I only use it on wifi).
 
My wife has mint and has used it for about 3 years now. She loves it. Ordered a sim card and popped it in her old phone and it worked right away plus she likes getting the voicemails from Ryan Reynolds(her celebrity crush). Internet does get a little spotty if you try to use it in a mall or something, but the rest she says is fine. No complaints and saving huge from her last plan. Good luck, i hope it works out great for you.
 
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I’ll be interested in how this goes. Never dug into it to know it runs on the AT&T network.

I’m at 8.27GB, with only 24 days left, so I think I’ll stick with my unlimited plan. 🤔
 
I started with a particular mobile company (not ATT) in 1993. It’s changed ownership a half dozen times in all those years, but we never changed. It’s Verizon now.

I’m a creature of habit.
 
BigWaylon said:
I’ll be interested in how this goes. Never dug into it to know it runs on the AT&T network.

I’m at 8.27GB, with only 24 days left, so I think I’ll stick with my unlimited plan. 🤔
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They have other tiers of data service including faux-unlimited.
 
fieldgrade said:
I started with a particular mobile company (not ATT) in 1993. It’s changed ownership a half dozen times in all those years, but we never changed. It’s Verizon now.

I’m a creature of habit.
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I've had a cell since 1992.... but haven't paid a cell bill until March of this year. Always work supplied, so this whole 'pay for your phone' thing is very new to me.
 
Jayne said:
I've had a cell since 1992.... but haven't paid a cell bill until March of this year. Always work supplied, so this whole 'pay for your phone' thing is very new to me.
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I felt the same way when I left Sylvania in 1989, after ten years. Who knew all those light bulbs were so expensive. lol
 
fieldgrade said:
I started with a particular mobile company (not ATT) in 1993. It’s changed ownership a half dozen times in all those years, but we never changed. It’s Verizon now.

I’m a creature of habit.
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Some version of Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile?
 
fieldgrade said:
I felt the same way when I left Sylvania in 1989, after ten years. Who knew all those light bulbs were so expensive. lol
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'89? You must be referring to whale oil lamps or something. Pretty sure light bulbs weren't a thing back then.
 
We switched the wife over to spectrum. It’s been solid. Even traveling.

I’m on a corporate plan with Verizon but will def switch if I come off of that.
 
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If it doesnt work out consumer cellular is another one worth looking at. Parents swapped from att to them and been happy less cost and they have a tech support you can call if you have issues and were pretty decent when we had to contact them one time, you just dont get much hardware support other than help activating a phone.
 
ok, done with the business I needed my phone to work for today, so now I'm going to do the switch.....
 
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Here was the process:

1. login to the mint account via the link in the email they sent
2. login to my AT&T account and request a transfer PIN following the instructions in the Mint email
3. use QR code on the screen to install the new cell info / eSIM into my iphone 12 mini
4. put account #, PIN, zip code into mint site, click the 'start transfer' button
5. get a text from AT&T saying "someone is trying to transfer your number, reply to this text with <number> if it's you"
6. miss the text in #5 because I wasn't paying attention
7. transfer failed
8. go back to AT&T and request a new transfer PIN
9. repeat step #3
10. hit the 'refresh status' button on the mint site, get a 404
11. hit the 'continue' button on the 404 page
12. hit the 'continue' button on the 404 page
13. get redirected to my new mint account page which now shows my real phone number
14. get a 'transfer completed' text from AT&T and Mint
15. have wife call my cell, call goes to my phone as expected

Mint did give me a temporary cell number with a 919 area code to use until the transfer completed so I wasn't off the air. In the phone it showed two lines, my 'primary' with my real number and a 'personal' with the 919 number. Now that the transfer is complete I went back and checked and the 919 number is gone from the phone.
 
Tagged
Wife is looking for something cheap. She's with Verizon now, and has my stepdaughter and stepson on her plan.
Now that she's retired she's making them find their own service and she's looking for cheap service.
 
iMessage is broke, first fallout from the switch. The phone shows 2 lines now, but both with the same (real) phone number. The 'primary' must still be with ATT, it doesn't work for data. If I make the 'personal' line the one for cell data it works. iMessage is still choking on the first line, can't make it stop trying.

Can't panic yet.... but I feel this is going to be a problem. When I switched to a new iphone it took 2 weeks and 2 trips to the apple store to get it working correctly.
 
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I turned off the 'primary' line leaving only the 'personal' one and switched cell data and default voice to 'personal' and then imessage reactivated correctly.

So the 'primary' line must still point to ATT. No idea if that will ever go away or if I just have to leave it off forever. The phone does let you rename the lines so I changed that one to AT&T and will make the other Mint just so that if they show up other places I know what's what as they have the same phone number showing.

EDIT: you can't remove 'primary' in my case as it's not an eSIM like the mint setup but the physical ATT sim card in the phone. Maybe if I remove the physical sim it will go away, but if it doesn't cause problems just being disabled I'm happy to leave it there and not have to pop the physical sim card out.
 
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I did a similar switch from AT&T unlimited to Spectrum (VZW network). No issues and still unlimited for only $45/mo.
 
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Chdamn said:
We switched the wife over to spectrum. It’s been solid. Even traveling.

I’m on a corporate plan with Verizon but will def switch if I come off of that.
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That's interesting. The only reason I haven't moved to Spectrum is the horrible reviews.
I'm on Verizon but they just sent an email saying they would be raising my monthly plan cost by $6+. Trying to force me into an unlimited plan.
 
Krusty said:
I'm on Verizon but they just sent an email saying they would be raising my monthly plan cost by $6+. Trying to force me into an unlimited plan.
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That was the straw that broke the camels back here. We've been talking about changing/consolidating plans and when verizon told the wife they were upping her bill she got on the war path to change.
 
Been with Verizon a long time and even though they are probably the price leader, never have coverage problems. Tried T-Mobile, Consumer Cellular and ATT.
 
Krusty said:
Tagged


That's interesting. The only reason I haven't moved to Spectrum is the horrible reviews.
I'm on Verizon but they just sent an email saying they would be raising my monthly plan cost by $6+. Trying to force me into an unlimited plan.
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Yeah. I mean I’m on Verizon. She’s using Verizon through spectrum.

We have the same damn phone and she will have signal sometimes where I can’t get but 1 bar. Lol.
 
I got an email from them asking if everything was OK. They said they've not seen any usage. I've made 2 test phone calls and sent a lot of texts, but haven't moved any real data. So either their tracking sucks or their definition of 'usage' is based off a 12 year old who spends 24/7 stuck to their phone.

Will be out and about today with pandora on in the car, so we'll see if they notice.
 
Chdamn said:
We switched the wife over to spectrum. It’s been solid. Even traveling.

I’m on a corporate plan with Verizon but will def switch if I come off of that.
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My wife has been with spectrum for about 3 years now. Switched my daughter over about 6 months ago. Not quite as cheap as Mint but 59.98 a month for 2 unlimited data phones is hard to beat. Never a issue with service
 
fieldgrade said:
I started with a particular mobile company (not ATT) in 1993. It’s changed ownership a half dozen times in all those years, but we never changed. It’s Verizon now.

I’m a creature of habit.
Click to expand...
Started with Bell Atlantic Mobile so many years ago and rode through the iterations to Verizon. When my wife was traveling the southeast, VA to TX, she noticed she was the only one that had consistent service in all states, compared to co-workers. They have been the most solid to work with, but not saying they're great and definitely not cheapest. We have multiple lines if service with them. We're about to discuss a business plan with them.
 
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Finally broke 100mb of data usage and it showed up on the app as 0.1gb of usage.

No drama using google maps or pandora on my outing today, sent a few imessges including a short video and some stuff via signal. Couple of old school SMS texts as well.
 
After my first month of service they sent a summary email of my usage:

mint_summary.png

the 2 minutes of talk makes sense, I use 'innocaption' to make calls with which is all data based, and most my chats are via signal or imessage so actual SMS texts are pretty rare.

Had some trouble with coverage at the H2O match on Saturday but other people in my squad were also having trouble getting signal so I don't think it was related to the mint service.
 
Jayne said:
After my first month of service they sent a summary email of my usage:

View attachment 511559

the 2 minutes of talk makes sense, I use 'innocaption' to make calls with which is all data based, and most my chats are via signal or imessage so actual SMS texts are pretty rare.

Had some trouble with coverage at the H2O match on Saturday but other people in my squad were also having trouble getting signal so I don't think it was related to the mint service.
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So your .67GB is really all your texts, calls and actual data combined? 😳
 
My son has been using visible which is part of verizon. You can get unlimited for as little as $15/mo if you get a
party or group of 3 accounts. Billing is separate and you don't need to be a family unit. Probably going to try that next month. Have been on straight talk for 7 years using cdma (verizon towers) without a problem with unlimited for $45. I had a work phone with ATT and had poor service in my area but have heard that it is better now.
 
mikehrl said:
My son has been using visible which is part of verizon. You can get unlimited for as little as $15/mo if you get a
party or group of 3 accounts. Billing is separate and you don't need to be a family unit. Probably going to try that next month. Have been on straight talk for 7 years using cdma (verizon towers) without a problem with unlimited for $45. I had a work phone with ATT and had poor service in my area but have heard that it is better now.
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I have been using Straight Talk on ATT networks with zero issues or dropped calls since I started using it. My work phone with Verizon on the other hand is another story entirely!
 
I just switched to T Mobile after being with Verizon for ever.The wife and I only had a 4gb shared plan w/Verizon so they were raising the rate $6 /phone($12) per month. We were already paying $97 /month with spotty service at my home.I switched to T Mobile Magenta 55+ unlimited for only $70 total per mo.The service is a little better at home but have unlimited and saving $39 /mo w/the verizon increase.I considered Visible that my son's family has, but decided to get away from Verizon totally.I compared coverage with a couple friends that had TMobile before I switched, and in most cases the T Mobile was as good or better than Verizon.
 
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