Porting my mobile phone over to a new network today, assuming it all goes smoothly. Since the demise of Virgin Mobile I’d been with Belong, because they were dirt-cheap ($10/month) and I wasn’t using much mobile data so 1GB, with the unused portion banked indefinitely, was just fine 😂 The lack of voicemail1 was a bit annoying, and just in the last year or so their network’s2 developed some reliability issues,3 but during the pandemic I’ve mostly been home with my own wi-fi anyway. The thing that really pushed me to jump was logging into their app the other day and discovering they were about to move me to a $15/month plan! I was like, “Screw that!” and ordered a new SIM card from Moose Mobile. This plan’ll give me 6GB for $14.80 ($12.80 for the first year – promotional price) and I’ll have voicemail and the hopefully-more-reliable Optus network with VoLTE. No data banking but I can’t imagine myself going over 6GB in a month anyway (and if I do I can just change plans). As a not-very-demanding mobile network user, I really just want something cheap that meets my modest needs, so if Moose can do that I’ll be happy!

Addendum: Yup, transfer went through about an hour after it was initiated, and with the SIM card now swapped and my phone rebooted it’s all working exactly as expected 👍

  1. They just had this “Message2Txt” thing that attempted to auto-transcribe any voicemail messages and usually garbled it completely… but thankfully I never got a lot of voicemail 😂 ↩︎

  2. It’s the Telstra Wholesale network, so really “Telstra’s network”, although Belong is just a low-cost, no-frills subsidiary of Telstra anyway ↩︎

  3. Something about mobile towers progressively turning off 3G space to reallocate it for 4G or even 5G, and if you don’t have VoLTE phone calls must be carried on the 3G network, causing congestion issues on the ever-dwindling amount of 3G space. And of course Telstra is dragging its feet on enabling VoLTE on its wholesale network, because Telstra. Also MMSes have been failing a lot. ↩︎