It's kind of a moot point if you're in the USA. There are only 3 companies that actually own and operate cell towers: ATT, Verizon, T-Mobile. I'm speaking in terms of privacy, not coverage or quality.

Any other company just leases usage of the towers from one of them.

• PureTalk = ATT
• Mint = T-Mobile
• Cricket = ATT

Then you have T-Mobile that gobbled up a bunch of smaller companies and kept the names to trick you into thinking it's a different company (kinda like Nestle and their local bottled water companies). T-Mobile also owns Sprint and MetroPCS.

that won't work without telling us your region. the largest part of the world doesn't even know what is AT&T, let alone ATT

US Mobile is a self-proclaimed "supercarrier" which offers SIMs across all major networks (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile), so you can change as you like according to your phone's compatibility. However, the CEO (who is active on /r/usmobile) has been known to kick existing customer loyalty to the curb in favor of new members, and their customer service centers are in Pakistan, where he's from.

These may or may not be good or bad things depending on your threat model, but one thing's for sure: their price is unbeatable! Come to think of it, I have a referral link for anyone who may be interested, but that's up to you. I actually dislike the CEO's practices, but I'm already locked in for a year and didn't know until later...

no such thing. just go for the cheapest. buy an rfid case when you are not using wireless networks, to avoid triangulation. Or buy a Fairphone/Librem 5/Shift6mq/PinePhone, those have hardware buttons to disable data receivers, but they cost a lot more than any other smartphone, but shouldn't be a problem if you can afford Samsung or Apple

I have my phone on airplane most of the time and use Wi-Fi with VoIP for calls and SMS. If I need mobile data, I have a Silent Link eSIM for mobile data only. If you ever need to make an emergency call you don't need a sim card or provider, emergency calls always work. While the main motivation is privacy, it's nice that it olny costs about $3 per month on average.

Visible. $25/line

Just use the phone number to register to a secure messaging service and remove the sim.

You can do it in a crowder place with no cameras

Go for a prepaid provider and give out as little personal information as necessary. Avoid the major carriers directly because they need a social security number.

That said, mobile phones are inherently not private. No matter what provider you choose, they will be able to track your location using tower triangulation. Even if you give a fake address, it would be pretty easy to identify you if you always have your phone on at home.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently as well. I decided that I wanted to ditch using any cell carrier in favor of a VoIP provider. I made a post here: https://lemmy.ml/post/26192657.

The two recommendations that came up the most were voip.ms and jmp.chat. Both require at least $15 to get started but you can port your old number over to both services too. From there jmp.chat is $5 a month, which comes with unlimited texts and 120 min a month.

With voip.ms the call and messaging is subtracted from your balance at a predetermined rate (per min and per text) which I haven't worked out the math on how much mileage $15 will get you initially.

From what I could see jmp.chat looked like it was the easier option to setup, with the Cheogram app for your phone and a Jabber app for the computer. Here's a wiki entry detailing how to setup jmp.chat: https://kb.above.im/jmp-chat/

I settled on discontinuing my mint service and setting up jmp.chat on my phone and computer, and then supplementing the limited minutes via Signal for calling. Seems like a pretty good alternative to me. I still have a week left on my phone plan, and then I'll be taking the plunge. I'd been using my phone less and less lately so it wont be too much of a shock, and I'll save myself an extra $20/month going from the $25 mint plan to $5/month jmp.chat plan.

I'd go with a discount reseller. You save so much money even with a Consumer Cellular, which is on the pricier end of resellers. I'd avoid Ting though, even though it's probably the cheapest, if you like keeping your phone number. They constantly try to steal your phone number because it's owned by some scammy Canadian ISP with a decades long track record of being an ass.

Why us mobile data such a privacy concern and wifi is so much better? I understand using standard calls and text is bad but if you use mobile data and not your phone number whats the difference between that and public wifi?

I’m not sure about decent, but in my experience, Verizon has been better than AT&T.