Curious why you're not a fan of VIsible? It's the same service any other VZW MVNO is going to provide but only $25/mo.

I've been using it on a secondary device for several months with relatively no issues outside of the latency. Use ~300gb/mo on the plan

I guess there were several reasons I never tried them. I considered it at one point, but my OTR service wasn't that bad at the time. Sure they had that bit of a debacle with AT&T shutting that part down, but they did try pretty hard to rectify the situation, at least from my point of view.

Then service from T-Mobile started getting worse and worse, and prompted me to start looking around again. I had contacted Visible before, and no one with Visible indicated that using their service would work as I was wanting to do it. I know, it was probably just a bunch of smoke because they didn't really know and to protect themselves, but it just threw some doubt in my mind. Plus, I couldn't get a definitive answer here or otherwise how to get it to work. Plus I kind of wanted to stick with a service similar to OTR where I might at least have some support to fall back on if something went south in the service, as happened before.

Then, with my experience with WiFi Mate, that rationale didn't seem to hold water. They used Visible for service, but something went wrong with it, and I just wasn't sure if it wasn't a problem with WiFi Mate or if Visible was the culprit there. So there was that seed in my mind about which one was flaky. Plus, IIRC Visible's service was 40 bucks a month unless you had more than one line, which would not be what I needed. So I saw online where others were using Page Plus with no problems, and decided to give it a shot. So far I have no complaints with it. It all may be a moot point for me in the near future hopefully anyway, as it looks like we may be getting fiber service from CEO soon. Fingers crossed.

As mentioned in a previous post, I tried using the Force LTE setting on my Cradlepoint hotspot because the AT&T tower kept dropping me to HSPA+, which is almost as slow as DSL.

In the past day or two, the Cradlepoint does consistently show LTE as my connection, but I have a lot of droputs now - no service for a few minutes - and then back as if nothing happened. Other times it never comes back to full speed - instead of 40Mbps I get 10Mbps though status shows LTE. Sometimes turning the CP on and off or doing a software reset works to restore normal LTE speeds, other times it doesn't.

Having the CP reboot overnight automatically isn't an issue for me since I have to manually do it a few times every day anyway.

You should try a full factory reset of the Cradlepoint just to make sure it's not the modem causing the issues. It's probably the tower, but it's worth a try.

Ok so suggestions for AT&T is Page Plus?

WheelinAg said:

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Ok so suggestions for AT&T is Page Plus?

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Page Plus uses the Verizon network, not AT&T. Page Plus is not a reseller specifically for rural internet like OTR, Nomad, or Bix, but a secondary economy cellular service. I think they are owned by Tracfone.

Three months in on the OTR blue blast plan and I have to admit, I've been pleasantly surprised. My expectations were low after all the chaos, but performance has been rock solid and speeds exceed what I was getting with the original at&t plan. For our limited needs, it seems to be a pretty good option.

Idk if its been suggested or not but you can extend your phone's hotspot to many modern routers just by setting it up correctly and plugging your phone in to the USB port on the back of the router.

I recently discovered this and for whatever reason, the connection is faster than my dedicated cellular modem.

Its very very handy.

Doing this with an asus AC2900. Sure it works with cheaper asus routers too.

Visible is a bit wonky with their network routing. I couldn't run the sim in a Nighthawk or other hotspots since they run a funky APN, but it's been working relatively well in a WE826 for 5-6 months. Normal speeds for me are 40-70 down and consistently 20 up. I've seen faster speeds when the sim is in a phone with a better modem.

The $25 is based on using party pay. You don't have to have multiple lines on your own. I'm in a party I found on Reddit with 4 people I don't know. We all get separate bills and our accounts aren't tied together in any way outside of the party.

Good luck on the fiber! I have fiber running in front of my house in the ROW. It's marked SWB which I assume ATT owns now. Been trying to figure out how to tie into it but really can't justify $1k+ a month for it.

JTA1029 said:

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Idk if its been suggested or not but you can extend your phone's hotspot to many modern routers just by setting it up correctly and plugging your phone in to the USB port on the back of the router.

I recently discovered this and for whatever reason, the connection is faster than my dedicated cellular modem.

Its very very handy.

Doing this with an asus AC2900. Sure it works with cheaper asus routers too.

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Probably because your phone is using 4x4 MIMO and carrier aggregation where alot of the modems are not.

@tfunk02

I have tried a full hard reset on the Cradlepoint - sometimes it works, sometimes not, same as just shutting it off and then back on. I have noticed that shutting it off and back on quickly never works. If I wait about 15-20 seconds after shutting it off before turning it back on, we're usually back to normal. It's started happening once or twice a week about two weeks ago, then once a day and now twice a day for the past few days. With Force LTE on, though, we never drop to HSPA/DSL speeds when service returns. Now, after we reconnect, I always get LTE between 30-60Mbps down. [knock on wood]

Probably AT&T or the tower. If I remember correctly, antennasearch.com reports that the tower is leased, not owned, by AT&T.

I have two cradlepoints with OTR Mobile AT&T sims on different accounts in locations about a mile apart from each other. At the same time this morning, both services went down. I switched mine to Tmobile sim I still have and still no service. OTR doesn't think it's on their end.

Anyone else just lose service? At this point, if it's not OTR, then the only common denominator is Cradlepoint. Any possibility of that? Pretty screwed if it's a Cradlepoint issue.

Also, I've been having to reset my modem multiple times per day, similar to situations above.

If they are only 1 mile apart, it could be the tower. I'm going to dig into this Cradlepoint internet drop this weekend. It's happening more and more for me. It reboots at night and I'm still having to reboot during the day. All wifi things quit working except for my cameras for a while. Eventually wired and cams quit too. It's strange.

Same here with my cradlepoint for some reason I have to keep restarting it, and this has been going on for three days now

I have identified the OTR issues.

I guess AT&T shuts off SIMs. Every few months they have to be refreshed by OTR. In this case, AT&T suspended my one account for the rest of the billing cycle. The other account just had to be refreshed. Working again now.

Also, fun fact, I guess OTR realized that I had both Tmobile and AT&T sims. I would switch back and forth when one service sucked. Now my Tmobile has been shut off. They also said that they realized that Tmobile (or at least their Pink Blast service) doesn't work well at all with Cradlepoints specifically. I can confirm that my tmobile service was terrible on two different cradlepoints.

I don't know why my Cradlepoint has been going out and had to be rebooted so frequently. My CBA850 has not being doing it (so far), but my AER1600 has. If anyone can figure out why, I'd love to know.

The rumor is that Verizon's rural LTE home internet service is coming to Texas soon. I sure hope this happens. I am not sure I'm going to be able to last long enough with OTR until Starlink actually becomes available.

I've been using an unlimited prepaid Verizon plan for my backup. It's lowest priority at the tower and I think I notice it since I'm pointing at a tower in South CS. On good days it's 60Mbps on bad days the latency is horrendous and I get maybe 3-6Mbps. At least it doesn't completely disconnect like the AT&T service does.

I've had the same problem with my NeverThrottled SIM today. My parents had it happen last week. Internet just suddenly stops working, and have to get a new SIM activated

This is an actual legitimate service offered by Verizon for home internet use. I'm guessing it has to do with them getting a bunch of funding from the federal government for rural broadband development and not ever actually doing anything with the money for that purpose. Much like the criminal organization known as Centurylink.

https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-home-internet-rural-areas

I've been keeping a record of AT&T problems since I got the Cradlepoint and the original OTR service last year. I'm in a rural area of Central Texas between Austin and San Antonio.

I had almost no problems with OTR until they switched to Tmobile (and before they started offering AT&T again). The TMobile tower is blocked by a hill so that service works, but poorly. I have direct line of sight from my office window to the AT&T tower on the highest local hill less than a mile away.

Not wanting TMobile I dropped OTR and went to Bix, which provided a branded AT&T SIM. For the first few weeks it was fine - 30-60Mbps down most of the time compared to 20-40Mbps with OTR. But then, instead of completely dropping the connection, the CP started to suddenly show HSPA as my connection, with speeds of 1-3 Mbps down. My Frontier DSL backup service is about the same speed. If I did a Cradlepoint hard reset (a bit fiddly), a software reset, or just a simple shut off for 20 seconds and then restart, I usually got it back. The past two weeks I've been getting the service stoppages every day, sometimes twice a day. Now I don't bother with resets and just turn the CP off for 20 seconds and then back on. It comes back 90% of the time. When it doesn't I have to turn it off and wait longer to turn it back on again. I now think going through the full reset procedure is a waste of time (in most cases).

As mentioned in my earlier posts, since I set Force LTE in the CP, I don't get the HSPA speeds when it comes back. But I wonder if that LTE setting has been causing the DAILY dropouts, which started after I set Force LTE.

Of course reading everyone else's experiences makes me think that all of the dropouts are just a straight AT&T problem.

Another weird thing on mine is when the internet stops the Cradlepoint is actually still connected to the tower. I can do a cloud reboot from my phone app (I have the Cradlepoint subscription). If the internet was truly not working then the cloud app wouldn't connect because I'm not on the network. I was thinking it might be a DHCP issue until I realized we are all having the issue.

Is anyone having the issue with a non cradle point device? Is the consensus that it's an AT&T issue, not a cradle point issue?

Since I had OTR refresh one of my accounts the other day, now my CBA850 also needs frequent rebooting. That's both of my cradle point devices now when before it was just one.

I started having the same issues with my CP CBA850 on NeverThrottled service last week. Once or twice a day, internet just stopped working even though it showed a good connection and signal. A reboot of the modem and it was working fine again. Then on Thursday my service stopped completely, but that's a problem with NeverThrottled directly though. Was told they had a mix up with their payment accounts and some stuff didn't get transferred over and it would be reactivated that night. Now it's Monday and still not working. Their support has been horrendous, so I may look at switching back to OTR (left when they lost AT&T temporarily).

So is it safe to say the issues are because of Cradlepoint?

I'm also with Never Throttle I agree the tech support is lacking, I might give bix a try next.

I think it's on the CP side, but I certainly won't argue with someone more knowledgeable who says it's AT&T.

Be careful about moving back to OTR. I'm not sure they're taking new customers right now. There aren't any services to sign up for that I can see.

And I chatted with customer service for a while the other day. It doesnt' seem like they are taking customers for Tmobile if they are on CP devices. They say they aren't compatible. And she said if I leave the blue blast, I can't come back later.

No problems with connections for me (knock on wood).

I am using:
- Cradlepoint with a nightly reboot
- Tmobile on OTR
- I think I am on the blue blast plan. It is whatever I was grandfathered into with the switch from ATT to Tmobile

I will add that since I have switched to a plan that uses Verizon, I haven't noticed any slow downs that can be specifically attributed to the CP modem. Since my phone plan also uses Verizon, I sometimes doublecheck service during slowdowns on it with wifi turned off. It usually matches pretty closely what I get through wifi. That indicates to me, at least in my situation, that the CP is doing its job properly, and bottlenecks are due to the network provider.

A reset/reboot may help the CP "switch gears" so to speak, and find a better band or whatever that improves speeds. I sometimes found myself doing that with the T-Mobile service from OTR. Just my thoughts, but I'm certainly no expert at this.

What plan are you using on Verizon?

I'm fed up with NeverThrottled. Absolutely horrendous customer service. Service completely went out Wednesday, and I was told I needed a new SIM card. They said they were activating my new SIM card last Thursday. Nothing worked still on Friday. Said they were getting it fixed ASAP, and they haven't replied since then. I've left voicemails, sent text messages and emails, and haven't gotten any kind of reply. To top it off, I got billed $85 today for another month service.

I tried to go back to OTR, and they are not taking anybody new. I looked at Bix, and they are no longer unlimited and raised prices to $100 for 400gb.

I guess I'm in the market for a new service now.

I'm using a plan through Page Plus. It isn't sold as a plan for internet like with OTR, Bix, or Nomad, but rather as an economical secondary cellular plan intended for phone use. Like Visible, which is similar and a bit cheaper, you get the SIM yourself and have to activate it yourself, which isn't too big a deal. It could involve placing the SIM in a compatible phone first for activation.

Both services have plans that include unlimited data, which is what you want. I think there are disclaimers about excessive usage being looked at, but I haven't heard of that happening for anyone. It hasn't been a factor for me yet. If, like me, you have better signal from Verizon than from AT&T or T-Mobile, it might be worth looking into. I am getting better service on my Cradlepoint router with just the standard "paddle" antennas that came with it than with my outdoor directional antennas I had to use for the other carriers. Of course I could probably get even better signal with my outdoor antennas, but I would have to get on the roof and reposition them, and I don't want to do that if I don't have to.

It seems more and more likely that the end is near. I think we should all be looking for new internet solutions soon. Starlink can't be commercially available soon enough to save us all.

https://nwida.org/t-mobile-removes-rural-dealers-over-excessive-usage

Jefe07 said:

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It seems more and more likely that the end is near. I think we should all be looking for new internet solutions soon. Starlink can't be commercially available soon enough to save us all.

https://nwida.org/t-mobile-removes-rural-dealers-over-excessive-usage

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Wow, that really sucks if that happens. We really need to have internet classified more as a utility in this country.

MaroonBloodedAg2010 said:

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I tried to go back to OTR, and they are not taking anybody new. I looked at Bix, and they are no longer unlimited and raised prices to $100 for 400gb.

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***** When did they do this? I looked the other week and they were still selling plans. I was going to do it this week, just waiting on my ebay retailer plan to die on the 18th of this month.

Not sure when they stopped offering it. I went to their website and the only stuff that shows up as available is modems/hotspots. The Blast plan page is blank, with the option to be notified when anything new is available. When I asked their chat support, they said the Blast plan is no longer available. I guess must be pretty recent.

@MaroonBloodedAg2010

I am on Bix and as they explained to me, AT&T enacted a limit of 400gb on May 1 - on ALL reseller hotspot plans. If you pay the extra $100, you can go OVER 400gb - may be unlimited at that point, but I'm not sure. If you don't pay the extra $100, and you're on the basic reseller plan, you may get throttled or booted off after 400gb.

So far my household hasn't reached the limit and I use a small app that keeps track of the data per day, per week and per month. We occasionally hit 300gb. Bix can also track my usage via the SIM number and their numbers match mine fairly closely.

Bix says this affects other services also. If you hit the limit, AT&T has the right, according to AT&T's rules, to simply cancel your SIM.

I'm only the messenger here - this could be true or not.

twbot said:

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@MaroonBloodedAg2010

I am on Bix and as they explained to me, AT&T enacted a limit of 400gb on May 1 - on ALL reseller hotspot plans. If you pay the extra $100, you can go OVER 400gb - may be unlimited at that point, but I'm not sure. If you don't pay the extra $100, and you're on the basic reseller plan, you may get throttled or booted off after 400gb.

So far my household hasn't reached the limit and I use a small app that keeps track of the data per day, per week and per month. We occasionally hit 300gb. Bix can also track my usage via the SIM number and their numbers match mine fairly closely.

Bix says this affects other services also. If you hit the limit, AT&T has the right, according to AT&T's rules, to simply cancel your SIM.

I'm only the messenger here - this could be true or not.

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This is very true, as I have first hand experience with it.

My account was shut down end of August. I chatted with OTR and they told me that I exceeded AT&T's usage limits, and thereby violated their terms. She sent me a screenshot of my usage and it was ~450GB. She did tell me that my account would be reinstated after the billing cycle, which is midnight tomorrow. Fortunately, I found an extra unused AT&T sim they sent me when switching between Blast plans. I popped it in, and it works. So...I'm not asking questions.

Long story, their non-descript terms are real. Don't exceed 400GBs or you will get suspended, at minimum.

Man $100 a month for 400gb at Bix? Getting pretty high... I might be getting a taller tower.