Cricket Wireless - 3g Modem Review

The internet is something that has become throughly ingrained in many of our lives today. It is how we stay connected with those around us and it is an extremely useful way of obtaining information. Most people have laptops or smart phones which they use to stay connected to the world wide web. Our laptops need a connection of some sort to access the information superhighway and while public wireless hot-spots are becoming more and more common, more often than not it always seems when you really need to get online to check on that important piece of information there is no wireless connection around (or they are all encrypted and you don't have time to crack one of them open). The obvious answer to this problem? Obtain your own wireless internet that you can bring around with you to use where ever you need it. Thankfully we have just that available to us in the form of 3g (and 4g) modems. There are quite a few different companies today who offer such services (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, ect.).

Thus brings me to my topic at hand today: Cricket Wireless. Cricket is still a relatively new company (by comparison) to the other competitors out there today. It prides itself on being "truly unlimited" and "affordable" compared to the other companies that are out there. I've been using their 3g service for just over six months now and I must say I have been decently happy with it. I'd just like to take a moment to summarize some of the keys things I like to tell people when I describe the Cricket Wireless service I have:

It's cheap by comparison - my service runs me 40$ a month, most other companies are about double this amount.

Theres no contract - Unlike most companies Cricket does not make you sign a service contract. You can drop your plan at any time with out an extra charge (the fee to reinstate service is only 25$ so even if you want to drop service for a single month you still save money)

It gets decent speeds - I've had the modem download as fast as 200kb/s and on average I see speeds of around 65kb/s. For the average user out there this means it is more than capable of providing web-surfing, email, instant messaging, streaming music, low-res video, and playing most video games online.

The service is "unlimited" - They provide you with "unlimited" bandwidth. I use the "" because once your data transfer hits 5gigs for a month they extremely throttle your transfer rate for the remainder of the month (I've never personally hit this cap so I'm unsure as to what it drops down to).

They don't support Linux - Its not uncommon for a company to ignore Linux and Cricket is no exception to this. However with a little bit of know how you can easily get the device working on most any platform.

All in all I am extremely happy with my little Cricket Modem - it is the perfect companion for my Asus EEE PC. If you are looking for a cheap 3g connection they are definitely one worth looking into. Also worth noting is that I live right near Chicago (a major city) and as such I mostly use my device in/around that area so they have strong coverage there. You should be sure to check if the Cricket coverage map includes where you live/plan to use the device if you are thinking of picking one up.

Happy Surfing All,

~Jeff Hoogland

HOWTO: Cricket A600 Modem & Ubuntu

So the Cricket cooperation is too lazy to make their device function by default on Linux so the following is a method I came up with some months back for getting your Cricket A600 Modem working under Linux. There are two methods listed below, choose which ever suits your needs.

Easy Method for Installing (pre-compiled debs):

Attached are the debs and a flipflop.sh to get this working do the following -

Step 1:
Download the .deb file for your selected architecture (32bit or 64bit) && install it

Step 2:
Download the flipflop.sh, Now right click on the file and select "properties". Click over to the "permissions" tab, and check the box "allow executing file as a program". Now double click it and select "Run", enter your password. Wait a few moments and poof! Your 3g modem should now be appearing in your network manager.

Notes:

You will need to run the flipflop.sh every time you connect your modem.

Before this guide will work for you, you do need to load the device on a Windows/Mac system and install the software for the device and activate it. (I have a Windows VM for just such occasions, it worked fine)

Installing from Source:

Step 1:

Download the archive and extract the contents to your preferred directory.

Step 2:

Open up terminal and use cd to change into the directory of the extracted files.

32 bit Users - Install usb_modeswitch with the following command: sudo make install

64 bit Users - We need to recompile modeswitch to work on the 64bit platform. Run the following commands in terminal to do so run the following in order in terminal:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libusb-dev
rm usb_modeswitch
make
sudo make install

Step 3:

Plug in your Cricket A600 to an open USB port, wait a moment for it to be detected as a CD drive/the auto play menu to pop up. Now we just need to execute the flipflop.sh, it is in the directory of files you extracted, by running the following: sudo ./flipflop.sh (Please note you need to first make this file executable by running chmod +x flipflop.sh)

After running the flipflop.sh you need to wait about 12 seconds (while it works it's magic) and then poof! Your Cricket device should now appear in your network manager as a connection option.

Notes:

You will need to sudo ./flipflop.sh each time you attach the device for it to work.

Before this guide will work for you, you do need to load the device on a Windows/Mac system and install the software for the device and activate it. (I have a Windows VM for just such occasions, it worked fine)

I played around with udev some trying to automate this process when you play the device in, but I could not get it to work properly, if someone smarter/experienced than myself would like to figure that out I'd be more than happy to add it to this guide.

Trouble Shooting -
If this guide does not work for you try first opening up the flipflop.sh and increasing the sleep time from 10 seconds to 20 - some systems require a longer delay.

If anyone has any trouble or has any input let me know,
~Jeff Hoogland