There were two very good reasons for getting rid of AT&T for our phone service. First was the cost of around $290 a month, second was that Kate had only 3 GB of data (whereas I had unlimited due to it being grandfathered in from being an early adopter of the iPhone). So I did a bunch of looking and decided that going with Mint Mobile was probably my best bet.
Mint’s plusses are that we could both get unlimited data, the cost would be significantly less than AT&T, and that the T-Mobile network that Mint uses is far more extensive. I also noticed that even in town I was getting a LTE service from AT&T instead of their promised 5G. So pretty much it was a no-brainer to switch.
At the same time I was looking to get rid of Spectrum Business as my internet provider at work. When I opened my shop in 2018 I needed to get internet hooked up, but Spectrum doesn’t offer their services a la carte, and they force you to bundle at least two of them. Since I already had phone service through AT&T (I had been with them since they were Ma Bell), I opted for internet and TV. The TV box never got hooked to a TV, and yet I paid for it for all these years to the tune of around $270 per month. Mint offers a service called “MINTernet” that costs only $70 per month. All tolled it costs $773.88 (taxes & fees included) for a 12-month agreement which saves me literally thousands of dollars per year. Another no-brainer.
So I ordered up Mint phone and internet. A few days later the troubles began.
A few technical things: my iPhone uses an eSIM to set up service, Kate’s phone is older and requires a physical SIM card–or so I thought. But that’s later… So I ordered a 12-month unlimited data plan for an eSIM phone, an unlimited data plan for a SIM phone, and MINTernet.
The box showed up just a few days later on a Friday. I took the internet gateway out of the box, and set it aside to setup the following Monday as I was anxious to be done that day. I brought the SIM card home, and was going to get everything switched over on Saturday.
The SIM card comes on a larger card that’s about the size of a credit card, and there is a code on it you use to activate your account… or so I thought. I mean, it does activate an account, but I thought it was going to be for both phones. I opened the Mint app on my phone, as you are supposed to do, and entered the code, and that’s when my troubles started.
What I didn’t see was a little link that read “I have an eSIM” and so I took all the steps they asked for for the wrong phone without knowing it. I ported my phone number away from AT&T which put my phone in SOS mode, but was not able to get it hooked to Mint. It was because I was trying to get my eSIM phone to work with a SIM code. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time.
There was also an issue of my phone still being locked to AT&T, which was supposed to just “automatically switch” to the new carrier. It did not. I was on a tech support phone call with them for about 45 minutes before they were finally able to unlock my phone, all due to the fact that I had purchased it second hand off of Back Market. This was exacerbated by the fact that I had already ported my number to Mint.
Mint has an AI chat bot that is very good at resolving technical issues, but even it has its limits and I was eventually connected to a real human. It took some doing, but they were able to switch the SIM stuff to eSIM and I was able to get Mint working on my phone on Monday morning. It took two days.
So it’s Monday, I’ve successfully gotten my phone switched, now it’s time to hook up MINTernet.
The unit powered up, and was getting excellent signal. I could even connect my computer to the WIFI signal and everything, but I wasn’t able to get it connected to my Mint account. It took another tech support phone call and a lot of “enter this 6-digit code” until we finally got it all taken care of. It took almost 4-1/2 hours to do so.
Then we worked on getting Kate’s phone going. It turns out that her phone can also use an eSIM, which is great because all the fucking around caused the code for the card they sent me to become invalid. It only took about 35 minutes to do so. It should have taken far less.
Now, I admit that a lot of this could have been avoided if I had made sure my phone was unlocked from AT&T before I started, and had I clicked “I have an eSIM’ right from the start, but that doesn’t change the fact that this whole ordeal was stressful as fuck.
Ultimately, I am glad we switched everything over. The savings alone makes it worth the time and effort it took, and I look forward to enjoying our new services.
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