Adventures in Cell Phone Hotspot Land

I live in Deep Fringe Suburbia, out of the range of the mainstream cable internet service of our area, Comcast.

For the first two years we lived here, we got along with Viasat, satellite internet that mostly worked (sometimes dropping me out of important stuff, like online bridge I was playing), but at a price: $160 per month.

Viasat: the Land Rover of Internet Services (expensive and not super performing)

I first experienced wifi hotspots while working at AT&T in 2013, and they worked great! I bought one in 2014 just to have an extra option when the internet service around me in a hotel or whatnot wasn’t up to par. This worked fine for about two years.

Then I got a cellphone hotspot plan on my phone, and dropped AT&T (just before the 2-year contract I apparently signed and had to pay a bit extra at the end to let it go. If I recall, it was $50 per month for no more than 5 GB of data.

Price/performance was not up to par in 2014/2015

But now it’s 2021 and I had noticed that the price / performance of these hotspots had improved enough to use one as our main home internet. We’re on a 3-line plan from Cricket and found out we could add their hotspot at $55 per month for 100 GB of data. Deal!

Unlike the rock-solid AT&T hotspots I’d seen before, the Cricket equipment was like keeping an old car running. It would freeze up to a couple of times per day (often while my wife was watching Netflix) and have to be restarted.

My Cricket Hotspot reminded me of this

I lived with this for 4+ months, but this month I got this sort of message on the hotspot screen:

A network issue is keeping your connection from happening. Please try again later.

The network has an issue, the thing implied

I brought up my cell phone hotspot (which should have given me clue on what was going on, but didn’t … it turned out we were out of data for the month, which I didn’t figure out until dealing with T-Mobile later in the day; I thought it was a continuing software problem with the hotspot) and went shopping.

But actually we were out of gas (data)

It looked like the two main other vendors, AT&T and T-Mobile, were clustered around the same price: $55 per month for $100 GB.

My first stop was AT&T … possibly just the store (Federal Way WA), but the store manager tried to steer me toward their “partner”, Century Link, which offers home Internet. I didn’t want that: I wanted the wifi hotspot deal on your website. “We don’t have that.” I left.

(AT&T doesn’t seem interested in new business or in accepting payments … my most recent experience with them was trying to pay a left over $40 DirectTV bill … they kept emailing me about it but put a link to the mobile site for payment, which didn’t work on my computer. I finally called them, waited on hold for 8 or 9 minutes and got somebody on the phone … who said there was no option to take a credit card to make payment but she could take my bank account. I hung up.)

AT&T may as well have been closed for all the interest they showed on selling me a wifi hotspot

I tried T-Mobile … after a couple of wrong turns (I got home with one of their hotspots that said INVALID SIM CARD when I connected to it.) I sighed, put my computer and their hotspot in my car and went back to show them it didn’t work. They tried another hotspot, which also didn’t work (no “INVALID SIM”, just no connection to the Internet) … they verified on their own phones that it wasn’t working. I was just about to get a refund and leave …

It was puzzling for a while ..

Finally they got a tech support guy who knew what was the problem: they had filled out ‘5G’ on the internal system, and these were 4G LTE hotspots. Finally they fixed this and it worked.

Finally, the guy who knew what was going on

Wahoo! It’s been up for days in a row … no rebooting necessary!