Our Experience with Cricket Wireless Broadband
I live in a housing development in which we currently only have one option for Internet service–DSL. We wanted to find a way to get out of this monopoly situation, so when I saw an ad for Cricket Wireless Broadband for $40 per month it caught my interest. So I went to a Cricket store and signed up for it. The guy at the store told me that if I didn’t like it I could get a full refund.
(Part of the deal is that you buy a little USB modem for about $100 and then get a $40 rebate or something like that.)
When I got home, I had some troubles installing the software for the modem, but the technical support people at Cricket were really helpful and patient. The problem was that I had disabled some services on my Windows XP machine, and the modem needed these to be enabled.
After getting it configured, I was able to get on the Internet. However, it was slowwwww…. I was getting like 200-300 kilobits per second. And the service would die for a few minutes and then come back to life. I tried this for a couple of days but couldn’t get it to work any better, so I brought it back. My guess is that the signal was bad because I live in an area that is surrounded by a big hill. But who knows?
So I took back the modem and canceled my service. But the guy at the store told me I still had to pay a restocking fee of about $13. That left a sour taste in my mouth. Come on, how am I supposed to know that their service is super slow at my house, especially after the guy at the store had reassured me that it would be fast? I probably should have persisted, but I’m not very confrontational.
Three other notes: 1) their modem only works on Windows machines, 2) they have a “soft” limit on data transfer of 5 GB, so you wouldn’t want to get the service if that is a concern, and 3) the guy at the store told me Cricket was planning to update their system to be faster soon, but who knows when that will be or how well it will work.
Would I recommend this service? Maybe. It depends on your needs. If you want to use it at home, it’s probably not the best way to go because it will be slower than most landline services and because of the data-transfer limit. If you ride public transportation or work on the road, it might be a better option than Verizon or AT&T because it is cheaper. But I have no idea how well it would work while you are moving.
All you had to do was go to Tools -> Activate and re-activate for your local cell tower. If you don’t do this then your speeds are crap.
I get 700kbps easily with my Cricket. So more bandwidth for me
I tried all sorts of things like you mention, but it didn’t help. If it was still trying to connect to one by the store, it never would have reached the 2-3 miles away. So it had to have been connecting to one closer to my home. Regardless, your comment brings up another important point for anyone considering Cricket Broadband. The more people who get on it in a given location, the slower the connection for everyone. This is a definite disadvantage to the technology they are using. But hey, it still might do the trick for some.