Is a 4g home hotspot not an option? Just curious as I have a few more rural friends that have better luck with a mains powered wifi modem that basically runs off of AT&Ts cell network.
I know I live in a different area, but in some places its significantly faster and even occasionally cheaper than satellite.
Yeah, if you have any 4G LTE available in your area, several cellular providers (at least all the major ones) have options for in-home cellular 4G LTE internet and even in-home cellular phone service. You can use any style wired-in (or wireless) home phone that you want.
Well, a quick look through the Cricket website doesn’t show any “home” devices. But, they do offer wifi hotspot service add-on for your phone for $10 a month. If you have high speed internet on your phone, it would allow you to use it as a wifi hotspot for other computers and devices. I think it’s a rip-off to have to pay to use that functionality, but most cellular providers do make you pay for it. There are some other caveats with the service as well, such as a requirement to already have the “unlimited” service plan on your phone, and a 10GB per month usage quota for the hotspot. Still, it might be cheaper and better than satellite internet!
Consumer cellular have both kinds of home connectivity devices available on their website (telephone and data are two different devices). But, I couldn’t find any mention of using wifi hotspot from your phone. So, to get home hotspot, you would have to get the device, which is $80 to purchase, and requires you to add another data line to your service plan.
In both cases, the hotspot feature would be completely portable, so you wouldn’t have to keep it at home. In the case of the Consumer Cellular device, the advantage is that you CAN leave it at home, or in a hotel room, or at a friend’s house, so other people can use it while you’re away.
How much internet traffic do you need? Consumer Cellular offers a 20GB plan. That’s not enough? I don’t think my family uses that much TOTAL, with our home internet service (including Wi-Fi to all our devices) PLUS our phone plan, which is only a paltry 1GB per month, shared among three phones! If you had 20GB per month, that would be about 667MB per day average, using it every single day of the month. Beyond that, they charge $5 per GB overage up to 30GB total for the month. So, $40 a month for the first 20GB, and another $50 for the next 10GB in the month. That does seem excessive, but again, I have to ask “How much internet traffic do you need?”
Only Unlimited 3am to 8am? Thats harsh. Shouldn’t be allowed to call that an unlimited plan at all. Unless that already built into all packages.
I now have cricket cell service once I got over the contract deals… when the “2 year free” phone packages faded away. Happy with my budget Chinese phones these days. And my last 2 made it longer than 2 years, the flagships of the day never survived this long.
I have moved (2 hours) to a more rural small town, but still got the same cable internet provider. However the same service here costs $20/month More. But it IS cable modem speeds, internet only. Haven’t had cable TV in 13 years. Never missed it either.
Got my 70+ years old Mom and Aunt off cable bout 5 years ago now. They don’t miss it either. Put computers in the living room on the TV’s and away they go. Caught on quick too. Aunts, garbage picked, Dell PC throws a fit a couple times a year with Memory faults. She watched me pull the mem out and reseat it a few times now she does it herself and keeps rolling.
At least your clear skies location don’t account for poor service. Satellite TV around here suffers on cloudy days let alone a snow blizzard, its useless.
IMO, even when talking about phones, there should not be any data caps whatsoever.
Data doesn’t actually cost money for the ISPs. It’s actually throughput and not speed. However, since they are, putting it lightly, money hungry, they just make stupid data caps.
@DavidEF, do you download games, images, files, stream video from services like Netflix, watch TV online, etc.?
It will easily blow through a 20GB cap in a matter of days.
@raccoon city, have you thought about asking if the ISPs offer long range Wi-Fi? It’s very inexpensive (relatively) compared to laying fiber down, and can easily deliver data over a couple of kilometers, up to 20km.
Few years back signed up for a prepaid unlimited 4G-3G plan. Rooted my Kyocera and turned it into wifi hot spot. It was fast enough for Netflix movies,and my laptop browsing.
I had it made until I hit the 100GB mark. They turned me off said I used to much. Really long call arguing about what unlimited means, they wouldn’t tell, but they turned it back on. Few days later I cracked the phone, babied it for another month before giving up. I tried to get the same plan but they said they never had that plan even tho I was on it for couple years. Now the prepaids go from 4G to I can’t load my weather app. I haven’t had a cell phone plan since then. But I still carry the phone with me.