Cricket Wireless Broadband Review

I just received my usb wireless modem from Cricket. I had used Verizon's in the past. I will tell you right now I am very disappointed. I will try it from a few different locations this week. From my home I am getting three bars on my mac and Vista machine. I am seeing pings of over 800ms. On a new server of WOW, I was in the red, even though the server was low volume. My max transmit rate is 21.1 kbps, my receive rate is 105 kbps. The MTU was not returning a value for me. It takes 72 seconds to return Yahoo mail. Facebook is over a minute. It seems slower to me than my dial up modem.

I was hoping it would become a decent replacement for DSL, but at least where in Colorado Springs it appears to be lacking. Here are some screen shots of trace routes.

For those who are not familiar asterisks are bad. LOL

It appears that level3 is where Cricket gets its bandwidth from. I will try it in a few days just in case it is a one day occurrence.

What is going on!

As you may have noticed, I have not been updating this Blog much. Well you can thank my Xbox 360 for that. I have been addicted to playing Halo3 with my little brother. I have also been playing Rockband with my daughter. My GamerTag is wer2chosen, so if you are a friend or family member, invite me as a friend if you have are on Xbox live.

The online portions are what I love about the Xbox. i think Live really sells the system. It is great to be able to downloads demos for nearly ANY game you are thinking of buying. It is great to rent a movie without leaving the house. It is a little pricey around $3.60 it seems. You have two weeks to watch it, but as soon as you click start you have 24 hours to watch it. I can run to the RedBox for one dollar. I think they need to lower the rental cost to $2.50, I would probably rent a movie a few times a week now.
The price for TV shows is pretty good. Around 160-180 points for most shows. You get 2000 points for $25.00

They have allot of gamer videos that are free though. You can purchase online games, that are pretty decent and fun. They tend to run 400-800 points. Most around the 800 point region. I think they should implement a rental policy for these. Some are games you will play over and over. One in particular is PacMan CE.
If I want to play a game, and have only 5-10 minutes this is the game I play. I play it EVERY day at least a couple of times. It is fun, yet challenging.

So I am very Happy we got the Xbox at Xmas. I only wish I did it sooner.