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Switch your phone to an MVNO

You can pay less on your phone bill, have greater flexibility over your contract, and keep same network coverage by switching to an MVNO.

An MVNO is a phone company that doesn't own a physical network of antennas and wires and mystery metal boxes in the street. Instead it rents them off a bigger network.

This seems like it would make it more expensive to run an MVNO, but they're actually cheaper. The big phone networks like the MVNOs because they allow them to market to different groups of customers, while the big network can maintain its position as the fancy one with Kevin Bacon in the ads.1

Since MVNOs piggyback off the signal from larger phone networks, you can keep your existing coverage and simply pay less for it. You just have to finding find out which MVNOs piggyback off your current network.

The one downside

Apparently, if you're on an MVNO and you go somewhere extremely busy, like a Taylor Swift concert, your data will be deprioritised. What this means in practice is that your live stream from Taylor Swift's will be more likely to fail. Such scenarios are rare.

Which MVNO should you change to?

If you want to maintain the same network coverage or are not in the UK, use these lists to work out which MVNOs piggyback off which network:

How to switch mobile provider?

In the USA, Canada, and UK there are rules that make it easy to switch provider. Go to the provider of your choice and they'll have a system for automatically switching you over. You'll be able to keep your phone number and everything.

Bonus points

While you're changing see if you can replace your physical sim card with an eSim. Getting an eSim will lighten your load by 0.1 grams

Footnotes

  1. 1

    I tried to reach out to Kevin Bacon for comment through a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, but didn't receive a response.

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