I traveled to Eastern, KY to assist with flood cleanup. Somewhere east of Lexington, my phone just stopped working. The signal bars had an exclamation point (!) and the phone said "Emergency Calls Only." The phone would not connect the entire weekend, even after reboots, reset of the network, pulling the sim, etc. (basically tried every option I could find w/Google searching).
I attempted to contact support using wi-fi in a dairy queen. Waited nearly an hour to get a rep on "chat" and the chat window logged me out, soon after I gave the rep my IMEI number. What a colossal waste of time during which I could have been helping flood victims.
This issue had nothing to do with coverage. My phone could see there was a mobile network called "Visible." It just wouldn't connect to it. The Visible coverage maps indicates coverage in the area. Why would my phone essentially be kicked off the network? When I eventually drove back toward Lexington, the phone connected again and all my alerts/messages started rolling in.
As you can imagine, flood cleanup efforts are incredibly dependent on a working cell phone. This service may run on the Verizon network, but it is not dependable. Also, "Live Chat" help is a joke. You wait in the queue for lengthy periods and then get randomly logged out instead of connected to an agent. It just happened again. This time connected via computer connected to fiber internet. Visible, you can do better than this.
