Ok, I have two phones. Both are personal phones. I pay for them out of my own finances. But, I consider one my personal phone and one for business. My personal phone is an AT&T Samsung S22. My business phone is a Verizon S20 FE phone. I have the two phones and I made sure that one was through AT&T and one through Verizon because I work from home. I am the breadwinner of this family. We don't have any high speed internet even avaialble to the house outside of 4g.
I've always said I need two ways to get online. If one fails, I always need a backup. Having unreliable internet is like having a job with an unreliable car. After so long of you not showing up because your car breaks down, they'll find someone else with a reliable car.
About 8 months ago, we moved from a house that had fiber to this house. We took a huge gamble. We needed a bigger house. We wanted land. So, I decided 4g would be good enough and, for the most part it has. I have a pretty nice 4g setup at home. I put a 4g antenna on a tv antenna pole above the roofline pointed at a local cell tower and ran that into the house. my wife is a cop so we get firstnet unlimited hotspot with no data caps at all. On the same pole, I also installed a 4G repeater to reamplify at&t cell signal in the house. So, it works out pretty well.
We use at&t 4g as our primary 4g connection because AT&T in our area works significantly better than verizon. But, verizon does work... just slower and less signal at our house. Driving around, verizon has a ton of dead spots.
But there has been multiple times where AT&T 4G was down in the area. One of the last times it went down, I jumped in my car and went to a verizon store and got a verizon phone so I had a second option when at&t was down. I've needed it a few times now.
Ok, for other reasons I don't want to go into on this thread, I cannot leave an unattended smart device in our house. My kids have done some really bad things. I have the smart devices under control in the house as long as I always carry this verizon phone on my person at all times. But, the phone is constantly falling out of my pocket. It's so annoying to carry two phones.
A few weeks ago, I called verizon and asked them how I can convert my verizon sim to an esim. I spent hours on the phone. transfer after transfer, no one could understand what I wanted. They kept wanting to port the number from verizon to at&t as a second line. I said to them... no. I don't want that. I'm told my samsung s22 ultra is not carrier specific. I want, when I make a call on the at&t phone that it uses at&t and the hotspot is at&t. But, if at&t is down, I want to switch to the esim and then the same phone I was just using with at&t becomes a verizon phone and makes calls using verizon towers and the hotspot is using verizon towers. So, if an at&t outage is happening, I'm not dead in the water. They just couldn't understand it. I was transferred and transferred... hungup on because they didn't know how to transfer... calling back transferred again. I spent like 5 hours on the phone. I finally talked to one person. It seemed like she knew what I was wanting.
When I go on the S22 phone and start the process of adding an esim, it wants me to scan a QR code. Even though the lady on the phone seemed to understand what I was wanting, she didn't know how to generate the QR code that my phone was wanting. After another hour or so working with her, I gave up.
But, I really would like to do this. Has anyone successfully used a SIM and eSIM on the same phone using two different carriers?
