Question S21 ultra help

markgraham312

Honorable
Dec 13, 2017
40
0
10,530
Whats happened is I upgraded from my s21 ultra to s22 ultra. the s21 ultra (T-mobile) is completely unlocked. the phone is completely paid for even did the permanent unlock thing. I gave my dad the old phone because he needed a new one. he put a Verizon (straight talk) sim. the phone works great, save for on massive issue. he doesnt get mobile data, as in he cant use the internet or any internet features without wifi. yet he can make calls and send texts. can someone help me? does he need to transfer everything to a t-mobile sim card?
 
This still tends to be such a messy thing even with recent cell phones.

First is to check that the phone actually supports the radio bands used by straight talk. The sim itself does not have the radios. Although they don't do it as much anymore phone many times would not have support for all radio bands used by all cell providers. So if they were to manufacture a phone that only runs on the radio bands used by tmobile even if you unlocked it just means you can put another vendor sim it and it will activate. It does not solve the issue that you might need to use radio frequencies that the phone does not have. Unlocking a phone does not change how it was manufactured.

Next verizon has been doing strange stuff with straight talk. It was always a second class performer, they did not allow straight talk to use their high speed LTE connections. Now this is the last time I looked at this. All this has been changing a lot in the last couple years. The vendors are trying to free radio bands and are dropping support for some older phone. I know a number of people that were told that their phone would stop working on some date. Verizon has been using voice over LTE and devices that do support it they are in effect forcing off their network.

The problem with services like straight talk is customer support sucks because that is how they save money to lower costs. You can try to call them but I have learned why paying for customer service is worth it when it comes to the messy problems with cell phones.

What might be easier is to look at switching to verizon prepaid plan. Verizon should be able to tell you if there are limitations on certain phones. There also is really stupid stuff. I had a phone that was purchased open so I could try out different vendors. To get it activated I had to call verizon and they had to add it to their data base where if I had purchased the exact same model but locked to verizon it would have just worked, and been $100 cheaper. At the time I was hoping to use sprint because it was cheaper but I did not get good coverage.
 
Verizon prepaid is called "VISIBLE" and it's awesome. You can do friend sharing and if you can get 4 friend's together it's only $25/mo for unlimited everything, including 5G. No one see's each other's bill, it's all paid separately.

Straight Talk plan is terrible, you only get 10GB of data before switching to 2G.
 
thats ok price, but youre sure you dont get bandwith limited?
we have in EU something like this aswell, 3 friends 24eur each for unlimited plan, but speed is limited to just 50Mbit

Yes and No. My iPhone is dual sim(all iphones Xr and newer are dual sim). I use my company sim on the main sim and I use Visible on the eSim just for data because my company emailed me several times to reduce my data usage. So I use my own plan for data. If I'm in a major city with 5G I've seen 250mbs and in my suburban area I can see 60-80mbps and in a rural area it's 5-20mbps when running speed tests. I've done numerous speed tests because I can quickly toggle between my Visible account and Verizon account for data. Speeds and signal strength are the same from all the speed tests I've done.

Services like Netflix and Youtube are throttled to 480p video. It's not a big deal since the phone screen is so small, 480p vs 1080p resolution isn't as noticeable as on a big tv. Mobile hotspot speed for my laptop is limited to 5mbps. Which I don't mind because I only use it to check emails anyways.

We are deprioritized, so in times of high congestion, full Verizon customers get priority in data vs prepaid and resellers. That's the same for all prepaid services though.

I've been using it for 2 years now. I love it for $25. I didn't want a high bill and I've never had an issue with the deprioritization.