I was recently notified by my wireless provider, Visible, that a network upgrade was “required to improve your service” and that the upgrade would result in a “faster, more reliable network” for the same price.
All three of our family members use Visible, we all requested the upgrade, and we were all sent new SIM cards. My wife and I installed our new SIM cards and simultaneously attempted to activate our phones on the new Visible network. Unfortunately neither of our phones successfully activated, so we were stuck without cellular service for almost a full day.
After several hours of futile activation attempts, I contacted Visible using their chat service which is the only way they provide customer support. On my first attempt, I was queued for about an hour and watched the progress bar slowly make its way to 100%, at which time I was supposed to be connected to a chat agent. Unfortunately something went wrong, and instead of connecting me to an agent, the chat box froze so I had to abort. On my second attempt, I waited another hour and this time was successfully connected to a chat agent. The chat conversation was horribly slow. Each time I entered a response, the agent would take 30-60 seconds to reply and often provided generic answers such as “Thank you” or “I’ll look into that” or other seemingly canned responses. It also felt to me like the agent was trying to help multiple customers at the same time due to the slowness of the replies. Anyway, after spending an hour on the chat line, I was finally told that there was some kind of outage on the Visible side (not Verizon which is the actual network that Visible customers use), that they were trying to fix it, and to try activating again the next day. I was also credited $5 toward my next monthly payment for all my troubles (admittedly this probably added 10 minutes to my total chat time). My wife and I did both successfully activate our phones the next morning.
Then it occurred to me that I should put Visible’s claim of a faster network to the test. Since I had not yet activated my daughter’s phone on the new network, I decided to do some speed comparisons using the iOS Speedtest app. I’ll admit that I could not conduct a completely fair head-to-head comparison because I was pitting my iPhone 12 Pro Max (which I’ll refer to as “12”) on the new Visible network against my daughter’s iPhone X (“X”) on the old Visible network.
My first thought was to perform a series of “control” speed tests where I measured download (“D”) and upload (“U”) speeds with both phones connected to our home Wi-Fi (provided by Spectrum). For all tests, both phones were placed next to one another so they were equidistant from the router, and I initiated the speed tests on both phones at the same time. The results showed similar speeds on both phones, with slightly faster speeds on 12 vs. X which might be attributable to the faster processor on 12 (I am guessing here).
The next thing I did was to test 12 (using new Visible LTE) against X (using old Visible LTE). Since my 12 is capable of 5G, but X can only use LTE, I had to change the cellular setting on 12 to use LTE only. I was pleased to see that I saw faster speeds on 12 than X, and the difference was greater than the observed difference in Wi-Fi speeds, so in other words the faster speed on 12 may not be explained by the hardware difference alone.
Next, I installed the new SIM card on X and successfully activated the phone right away. Then I re-ran speed tests on 12 and X, with both phones using the new Visible LTE network. Surprisingly, I observed more or less the same speeds on both phones. Because I saw wide variability in download speeds on both phones with different runs, I performed 5 runs on each phone (instead of 3 like I did before). In any case, with this small sample size, I saw no convincing evidence that the network upgrade yielded faster speeds on X—about 17 Mbps download and 6 Mbps upload on both the old and new Visible networks.
For good measure, I re-ran my control comparisons with both phones using home Wi-Fi, and results were very similar to my initial control run.
In conclusion, I was disappointed to not see any significant speed improvement on the new Visible network. Even though the 12 vs. X comparison was not a fair head to head comparison, the speeds on X were similar on the old and new Visible LTE network. A limitation of this experiment is that I only compared LTE speeds because X is not capable of 5G. It is possible that the new Visible network is in fact faster than the old network in 5G connectivity, but I did not see that in fine print anywhere, nor was I able to directly test that hypothesis.
This reminds me of a similar experiment that I conducted a couple years ago when I conducted a Comparison of 4G and 5G Cellular Networks.
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