1 min readeSIM technology by design makes it much faster to switch providers- rather than waiting for a new SIM card in the mail you can activate your account almost immediately. That is, as it would turn out, unless you’re a Tangerine customer moving to More Mobile.
Like 232,000 other people across the country my data was recently compromised in the Tangerine Mobile data leak. While I’d been meaning to switch providers since the price rises came into effect last year, this was the push that it took for me to actually take the step. More Mobile- a Telstra MVNO you may know for its partnership with the Commonwealth Bank- was my new provider of choice. Right now they’ll give you three months free if you’re a Commbank customer, plus an ongoing 10% discount. It's a good deal.
After purchasing an eSIM the activation should be simple, but many attempts later I was still getting hit with an ‘error’ message. When I called More Mobile customer support I was informed that my account was active and had been since 2022.
You see, More Mobile and Tangerine are owned and operated by the same entity, so the registered phone number was already in the system. Seemingly this caused some issues with the porting request process, leaving my new SIM in limbo and me stranded up the fruit tree.
Customer support was quick to respond but were understandably a bit confused about what was going on. Once I explained the background they ported me across within five minutes but without the background information it may have taken much longer to diagnose the issue. If you’re thinking about switching between the two sibling providers you may need to do a little bit more legwork to get across.
While they share a network and systems, WhistleOut reported yesterday that More Mobile customers’ data was safe from the leak.
