Verizon’s Visible customers are missing calls, texts, and data after ‘upgrades’

Last week, Verizon’s budget-focused carrier Visible announced some sweeping changes, introducing new plans that utilize an entirely different network infrastructure. The carrier told customers that if they chose to upgrade, they’d get better roaming coverage and latency as well as extra features if they sprung for the $45 a month Visible Plus plan.

Reviews among those who have successfully upgraded or signed up seem to be largely positive — most report seeing better speeds and significantly improved latency. (Though there are a few who say they don’t really notice any difference between the legacy plan and the new one.) But for many other customers, the switch has been fraught with service and customer support issues.

One of the most frequent complaints among people on the Visible subreddit is a lack of service after upgrading. A few say they didn’t have any service at all after signing up. (One user humorously quipped, “Fortunately, between the referral bonus and a Chase credit card offer, I effectively paid $0 for that month of [Visible Plus] service, so I can safely say I got what I paid for.” More common, though, are reports of semi-working service. Several users report that they’re able to text and make calls but can’t use data; others report having data but no calls or texts. There are even a surprising number of people saying they can send texts, make calls, and use data, but they aren’t receiving incoming calls.

Verizon didn’t immediately provide The Verge’s with a comment on the issues customers are facing.

Some people haven’t been able to get to the point where they’d know if they were having service issues, as they’ve run into issues trying to get their phones activated after popping in the new SIM card that the plan requires (or after downloading the eSIM). One person said their phone still failed to activate even after Visible support said the issue was fixed.