My phone is several years old, and frequently disconnects from WiFi and Bluetooth (and always together), and its battery isn't lasting as long as it used to.

The battery still lasts all day, but sometimes by the time I plug it in at night, it's down in the red warning area. The disconnection of WiFi is less bothersome, but means a lot more (and slower) cellular data. The Bluetooth, though, means my watch doesn't get updated, which has much more impact on my day.

The wife's similar phone is more impacted in the battery, but she recently started having the wireless impacts, which didn't bother her for the network (although it is slower and more cellular data), but would mean her headphones wouldn't connect.

Google's on the brink of releasing the Pixel 6, so we took advantage of some (seeming if not real) price changes and ordered a couple Pixel 5a devices. They arrived on Friday.

After work, I unboxed mine and swapped the SIM card from my old phone. It fired up and recognized the SIM, registered my phone number, and started copying all the things from the old phone. I waited until that was done and poked at it. I sent my wife a text message, and she said she sent me a reply, but it never arrived. I also failed to receive some 2FA SMS messages when I tried to log into things like Twitter. I searched to see if I was the first, and found that Verizon has some settings they need to change. The Pixel 5a is the first phone supported by Verizon that doesn't have CDMA, which I didn't look for (or really care about, but do understand...), and that they need to change a setting to enable SMS delivery. It seems you can send, but not receive otherwise. The same set of linked articles warned about 4G and 5G SIM card incompatibilities, but anecdotal argument went both ways. I noticed that when I disabled my WiFi, the phone said 5G, so I figured I was in the realm of "works for me."

I shared this with the wife, and she agreed that while she was running errands the next day that she'd swing by and grab 5G SIM cards. She took the phones with her, and said she'd get the Verizon peeps make 'em work, and we could finish the installs at home later. Groovy, I said.

She came back with a task as she'd arrived too close to their closing for them to finish. Apparently not only did they want to go home, but their systems don't let them do some things after too long after closing. I call "weak" on that one, but what do I know? Today I called and talked to them to get my phone registered in their device database; seems sometimes phones get missed from manufacturers, and the Verizon dude thought mine might be one of those. The nice Verizon person I spoke to agreed that my phone wasn't in whatever that data is, so she went to add it, and came back with "phone is incompatible with our frequencies." I returned the message to the missus, who reached out to Google, who said "all the phones are the same, but yours is in a lot meant for Google Fi." We'd ordered three phones, one for each of us, and one to upgrade her dad, but it seems Google would only allow her to order two Verizon phones, so she ordered a Fi phone, too, figuring we'd just change SIMs and be on our way. Seems this is that data divide, and why Google didn't share the phone details, so Verizon didn't have it in their database.

A call to Verizon today hooked the wife up with a super helpful person, who was seemingly more familiar with the Bring Your Own Device world, and said she'd make the right moves to get our phone entered into their database. At the end of their call, my 4G phone was disabled, and all of the other cellular things on my 5G were working, except SMS. Their promise was to try to get the data changed and the phone working in the next day or so.

Fingers crossed!

It works great, except I can't get SMS messages, or log into any apps where I have SMS as my 2FA mechanism. I'm sure I have saved codes for most of them, and can get that working if I need to, and maybe even change to using the Authenticator app. I was using SMS instead of the app in a lot of places because the app data wasn't portable. Now it is, as you can export and import, so my iPad and phone(s) have the same settings and codes. Maybe I'll change those I can, as SMS isn't really better from a security standpoint. And I can attest it's a bit of a blocker from an inconvenience standpoint.

Everyone's healthy.