I’ve been trying out the new carrier MobileX. It’s founded by Peter Adderton, who previously founded Boost Mobile.
MobileX looks awfully promising. I’ll have more to say about that in a later post. But despite MobileX’s promise and great pricing, I’ve been holding off on recommending the service until it matures. I’m wary of brand-new carriers. Typical consumers are probably better off with carriers that have had enough time to work out the kinks in their systems.
My hesitations were validated when MobileX experienced a data outage on Thursday. I don’t think the issues lasted all that long, and standard calling and texting continued to function.
I first became aware of the outage with this tweet:
Well…it seems that one of our engineers did a test that probably should have been done while you were sleeping. Unfortunately, our network data connection has been disrupted momentarily. Phone/text is live. We apologize for the interruption and for not providing advance notice.
— mobileX us (@mobileXus) April 20, 2023
I appreciate MobileX’s communication style. It doesn’t match the vague corporate-speak that’s usually seen in the telecom industry. The company followed up on the initial tweet with this one:
In fairness to our engineers, turns-out it actually WASN’T one of them. But we still own the issue.
Now back to interrogating our contractor… pic.twitter.com/W1ju6suDO0
— mobileX us (@mobileXus) April 20, 2023
I didn’t notice exactly when my data service ceased working, but service was back about an hour after the first tweet came out.
MobileX support response was very slow (no timestamps given) and was not consistent or effective for me. They weren’t willing to help fix my port request that was stuck for several days – they would not resubmit it or call the other carrier to help resolve the issue. They wanted the carrier losing the number to do all the work, and would not budge.
The app has poor instructions about sequence of next steps for eSIM activation and gives odd error messages that don’t explain the real situation. You also need to install a profile for data to work on iPhones (like most AT&T MVNOs).
With MobileX you have to rely on typed support requests to get help.
Wait and wait and hope for a good resolution.
MobileX is still in beta if my experience is representative.
Hey thanks for sharing your experience. MobileX’s product certainly doesn’t feel polished yet. I’m yet to try out MobileX’s porting process, but this is a good reminder that I ought to.