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Any thoughts on CricketWireless?
Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2020 7:20 am
by LoveMeSomeCALTE
CricketWireless was not on my radar because of their 3Mbps AND deprioritization BUT recently they came up with a newer version of their plan that increases the speed to 8Mbps (deprioritization remains).
Now that should be more manageable for Zoom meetings.
Coupled with their CricketGroups, the unlimited Core plan essentially costs $25/line unless I am missing something!
So here I am - wondering, what am I missing with the great value at CricketWireless?
Do they have some extremely terrible deprioritization or something I am missing at this price?
How has your experience being or if you are yet to use them, what is holding you back?
Re: Any thoughts on CricketWireless?
Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2020 8:49 am
by prideauxx
Thinking out loud-
If your signal was strong enough so you could keep costs low without additional, expensive antenna kit, bundle 3-4 of these plans (each with its own modem/hardware setup) into a load balancing/failover router. Or figure out how to do this with a single piece of router kit and 3-4 USB modem enclosures/interfaces.
You theoretically would have 24-32Mbps down and up, for $75-100 a month. This may not be good value for the investment made in hardware and monthly fees, and I am uncertain how well load-balancing 3-4 ISP connections would actually work out, but different situations apply to different people. Maybe it would be worth it.
I'm starting to hear more about 5G in general--not sure how realistic the timeframe is, but AT&T business solutions are getting their PR butts in high-gear about it, and have some flashy ad/videos out. Thinking out loud (again), if this may help push these lower-tier 4G plans down in price even more. If the Cricket plans were $10-15 a month, might be onto something.
Re: Any thoughts on CricketWireless?
Posted: Thu Jul 30, 2020 5:27 am
by BillA
prideauxx wrote: ↑Tue Jul 28, 2020 8:49 am
Thinking out loud-
If your signal was strong enough so you could keep costs low without additional, expensive antenna kit, bundle 3-4 of these plans (each with its own modem/hardware setup) into a load balancing/failover router. Or figure out how to do this with a single piece of router kit and 3-4 USB modem enclosures/interfaces.
You theoretically would have 24-32Mbps down and up, for $75-100 a month. This may not be good value for the investment made in hardware and monthly fees, and I am uncertain how well load-balancing 3-4 ISP connections would actually work out, but different situations apply to different people. Maybe it would be worth it.
I'm starting to hear more about 5G in general--not sure how realistic the timeframe is, but AT&T business solutions are getting their PR butts in high-gear about it, and have some flashy ad/videos out. Thinking out loud (again), if this may help push these lower-tier 4G plans down in price even more. If the Cricket plans were $10-15 a month, might be onto something.
Load balancing/failover doesn't increase speeds, it's only a backup method if one of the connections fails.
In order to increase/combine the speed from multiple sources, you need channel bonding which can be done with an expensive hardware router or for free using OpenMP-TCP-Router which is not an easy setup involving a VPS, but doable.
https://wirelessjoint.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1078
Unfortunately even with 5G, prepaid services such as Cricket will still be throttling speeds regardless of the raw connection speed.
Re: Any thoughts on CricketWireless?
Posted: Thu Jul 30, 2020 5:41 am
by LoveMeSomeCALTE
Thank you both.
Besides the 8Mbps (for the "core" $25/mo plan in a group) or none (for the "more" $32.5/mo plan in a group) AND deprioritization, is there anything else that I am missing with the great value at CricketWireless?
8Mbps, deprioritized at $25/mo could be excellent value unless the deprioritization strategy is like Visible where is extremely unpredictable (does not correlate with time of the day and day of the week as most deprioritization strategies go)
For example, I noticed they want the IMEI of the device on sign up - do they enforce the IMEI?
Can I freely move the SIM between devices without having my account shutdown etc?
... and of course feedback about speeds (within the advertised thresholds) would be very welcome!
Re: Any thoughts on CricketWireless?
Posted: Thu Jul 30, 2020 7:44 am
by MattB29
With out knowing if they enforce it I can say that Crickets Terms of Service prohibits moving sims to another device.
My feedback for speeds would not help since I am on the Cricket Simply Data plan that does not cap them.