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I hope that your week has been great. I had a wonderful week celebrating my birthday with family and friends.
Millions of people lost their Verizon service this week on Wednesday. Why did this happen? “A software issue.” Verizon issued an apology but specifics have yet to emerge. They did offer a $20 rebate to those who requested it, which hasn’t gotten great feedback.
I received dozens of messages Wednesday from friends on Verizon:
“Infuriating.”
“I can’t do anything.”
“Nothing works.”
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I was a Verizon customer for 25 years before switching to Noble Mobile a few months ago. I will say, all of my stuff worked perfectly fine this week as was the case for everyone on Noble, which sits on the T-Mobile network.
Not coincidentally, Noble saw a surge in signups on Thursday and Friday from now-former Verizon subscribers who said they saw the outage as a sign to switch.
They were motivated by a few things.
First, Verizon is expensive. The average American is paying $83/month for their wireless connection; I was paying Verizon $150 a month for just my one line. Why did I pay so much? I convinced myself that Verizon was ‘the best network.’ But can it be the best if it goes down without warning? Why pay a premium if it’s not going to be reliable?
Second, the natural fear is that if there’s an outage, there could be another one, particularly as there hasn’t been a detailed explanation for this one.
These fears are well-founded. Lee McKnight, an Information Studies professor at Syracuse said that outages are “a fact of life these days for major telecommunications firms. Modern telecom networks are cloud networks. 5G networks are mainly, like, hundreds of different cloud services.” Hence the software issue. Sanjoy Paul, a wireless network expert at Rice University echoed this, saying “With cloud and software-based networks, there are more opportunities for glitches and attacks . . . small issues with computer code can have big consequences.”
Should one be concerned about Verizon in particular? Well, the company is going through a lot of change. They got a new CEO in October, who said that “cost reductions will be a way of life.” They then immediately announced layoffs of 13,000 employees, which is about 13% of their workforce. That’s not great. The new guy immediately said, though, that he wouldn’t touch Verizon’s 6.6% cash dividend, which pays out about $11 billion a year to shareholders. That dividend is a nice reward for holding the stock, but it doesn’t do a lot for network reliability.
One thing I noticed too: Verizon recently had a marketing campaign that said, “2-year price guarantee” as in “we won’t raise your price for 2 years if you sign up now.” Which kind of suggests that . . . they plan on raising prices.
Let’s say you’re someone who thinks you’re paying for quality and reliability. My argument to Verizon customers is that, at this point, you’re probably paying more to enrich Verizon shareholders than you are anything else. Is that worth paying more every month?
Also, a lot of the people I spoke to this week really value being connected. Did you know you can add a second network on your phone via an eSim for $30 a month? Any iPhone from 13 on has this capacity, as do the newer Samsung and Google devices. That way, if your network goes down, you could just switch networks. This week, when you noticed your phone wasn’t working, you could have switched to the Noble eSim and been perfectly fine. You could even use this as a way to get comfortable with a new network.
Evelyn said to me, “It might be a good idea for different family members to be on different networks in case of an emergency.” Two might be better than one.
In this day and age, that might be the lesson from this week’s outage. Things will go down. Redundancy might be a very good thing. And if you’re paying for something, you should do your best to see that you’re getting what you paid for.
To switch to Noble to cut your wireless bill and be rewarded for using less data, email [email protected] for our best offer, which is 3 free months. You can also email us to add a second esim to your phone. This won’t be the last outage. Why not be prepared? You’ll feel very smart that day.
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