My Short-lived Trial of Verizon Family Locator
12.2 هزار بار بازدید -
6 سال پیش
-
In this video, I'll tell
In this video, I'll tell you about my very brief experience with Verizon's Smart Family Locator product.
*** A full transcript can be found at www.marblejar.net. ***
Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today's video, I'll tell you about my very brief experience with Verizon's Smart Family Locator product.
I have been using Verizon's Familybase product for many years now. It's an add-on that you can buy from Verizon Wireless that I use for one thing only -- to limit the amount of cellular data each my kids can use. Like many families, we have a block of data and everyone in my family shares it. The problem is that I limit what my kids can do over wifi at home with a Koalasafe router. So — in order to work around this -- my kids switch over to cellular. They can blow through all of our monthly data in a couple of hours by watching Netflix or YouTube videos. And since my husband needs cellular data for work travel, this can really start to add up.
So, I set up data limits for my kids using what used to be known as Verizon Familybase. They recently rebranded it to Verizon Smart Family and it costs $5 a month. Each of my kids gets about 2GB of data per month. When they use it up, their data shuts off altogether.
This I find annoying. Once my kids' data shuts off, which is inevitably within the first week or so, we can't do find my iPhone, they can't text their friends, and I can't use everyone's favorite family locator app, Life360.
Ugh. What I really want is for Verizon to throttle the data rather than shut it off when my kids reach the data limit. They do this with our main account. Once the data is used, they throttle the data speeds down to almost nothing, but you can still perform functions that don't need a ton of data -- like Find My iPhone. Anyway -- that is not an option right now. For Smart Family, the data is either on or off.
Recently, Verizon added a new offering to its line-up -- Verizon Smart Family Premium. Which is basically Family Location Tracking. So for an extra $5 you can get location tracking for your whole family. And, according to the customer service rep, whom I didn't trust entirely, you don't need any data for tracking. $5 seemed a reasonable amount for this kind of info, so I signed up.
Once you sign up, you can determine who on your account is the child or parent.
Annoying thing number 1 -- they make the account owner the parent and then everyone else on your account had to be children. Perhaps I was doing something wrong, but it seems really silly, but my husband is the account owner, so he was the parent and I had to be a child along with my kids. But maybe that wouldn't be a problem?
Annoying thing #2 - In order for this system to work, you had to install apps on each person's phone and then go through this elaborate pairing process. I don't mind jumping through hoops as long as I don't have to do it too frequently, but this process took A LOT of time. I had to access each person's phone, download an app, send that person a pairing code, and then go through this long pairing process. Finally I had everyone set up and
Annoying thing #3 - as soon as I logged in with my husband's info, it logged him out and vice versa. Since there was no way to save the password in the app, I had to keep entering it in. This was problem with only letting one of us be in the role of parents. Otherwise, since I had a child profile, even though I had made everyone's location available to everyone else, I just had access to much more limited information. In addition as a child, I HAD to be paired in order to see ANYTHING otherwise I couldn't get off the initial screen. All of that is not great and would be mildly inconvenient if it weren't for
Annoying thing #4 - It's actually inaccurate to call this an annoying thing -- this was a dealbreaker. It destroyed my kids ability to use wifi. In some cases they couldn't connect at all, in others they couldn't use it reliably. Verizon uses a VPN in order to communicate location information. I do not know why this happened exactly, but it prevented both kids from connecting to our home wifi reliably. Unbeknownst to them, the VPN would frequently drop their WiFi and then they would eat up a ton of cellular data, which -- as I told you before -- is capped at 2GB per month, so they were super SALTY about that. Then they weren't able to connect to the school wifi at all, which since I cap their data, made it impossible for them to get things done at school. We got to full breaking point within a day and a half. I was forced to uninstall the app on all phones, which DID NOT do away with the VPN. Then I had to delete the VPN profile off of each phone, which took some figuring out. . .
*** A full transcript can be found at www.marblejar.net. ***
Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today's video, I'll tell you about my very brief experience with Verizon's Smart Family Locator product.
I have been using Verizon's Familybase product for many years now. It's an add-on that you can buy from Verizon Wireless that I use for one thing only -- to limit the amount of cellular data each my kids can use. Like many families, we have a block of data and everyone in my family shares it. The problem is that I limit what my kids can do over wifi at home with a Koalasafe router. So — in order to work around this -- my kids switch over to cellular. They can blow through all of our monthly data in a couple of hours by watching Netflix or YouTube videos. And since my husband needs cellular data for work travel, this can really start to add up.
So, I set up data limits for my kids using what used to be known as Verizon Familybase. They recently rebranded it to Verizon Smart Family and it costs $5 a month. Each of my kids gets about 2GB of data per month. When they use it up, their data shuts off altogether.
This I find annoying. Once my kids' data shuts off, which is inevitably within the first week or so, we can't do find my iPhone, they can't text their friends, and I can't use everyone's favorite family locator app, Life360.
Ugh. What I really want is for Verizon to throttle the data rather than shut it off when my kids reach the data limit. They do this with our main account. Once the data is used, they throttle the data speeds down to almost nothing, but you can still perform functions that don't need a ton of data -- like Find My iPhone. Anyway -- that is not an option right now. For Smart Family, the data is either on or off.
Recently, Verizon added a new offering to its line-up -- Verizon Smart Family Premium. Which is basically Family Location Tracking. So for an extra $5 you can get location tracking for your whole family. And, according to the customer service rep, whom I didn't trust entirely, you don't need any data for tracking. $5 seemed a reasonable amount for this kind of info, so I signed up.
Once you sign up, you can determine who on your account is the child or parent.
Annoying thing number 1 -- they make the account owner the parent and then everyone else on your account had to be children. Perhaps I was doing something wrong, but it seems really silly, but my husband is the account owner, so he was the parent and I had to be a child along with my kids. But maybe that wouldn't be a problem?
Annoying thing #2 - In order for this system to work, you had to install apps on each person's phone and then go through this elaborate pairing process. I don't mind jumping through hoops as long as I don't have to do it too frequently, but this process took A LOT of time. I had to access each person's phone, download an app, send that person a pairing code, and then go through this long pairing process. Finally I had everyone set up and
Annoying thing #3 - as soon as I logged in with my husband's info, it logged him out and vice versa. Since there was no way to save the password in the app, I had to keep entering it in. This was problem with only letting one of us be in the role of parents. Otherwise, since I had a child profile, even though I had made everyone's location available to everyone else, I just had access to much more limited information. In addition as a child, I HAD to be paired in order to see ANYTHING otherwise I couldn't get off the initial screen. All of that is not great and would be mildly inconvenient if it weren't for
Annoying thing #4 - It's actually inaccurate to call this an annoying thing -- this was a dealbreaker. It destroyed my kids ability to use wifi. In some cases they couldn't connect at all, in others they couldn't use it reliably. Verizon uses a VPN in order to communicate location information. I do not know why this happened exactly, but it prevented both kids from connecting to our home wifi reliably. Unbeknownst to them, the VPN would frequently drop their WiFi and then they would eat up a ton of cellular data, which -- as I told you before -- is capped at 2GB per month, so they were super SALTY about that. Then they weren't able to connect to the school wifi at all, which since I cap their data, made it impossible for them to get things done at school. We got to full breaking point within a day and a half. I was forced to uninstall the app on all phones, which DID NOT do away with the VPN. Then I had to delete the VPN profile off of each phone, which took some figuring out. . .
6 سال پیش
در تاریخ 1397/07/23 منتشر شده
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