Cricket Offering Prepaid Wireless Broadband

Cricket Offering Prepaid Wireless Broadband
Sascha Segan - PC Magazine
Fri Sep 12, 8:11 AM ET

"There is nobody in the market providing wireless broadband to a low-income customer with no contract," said Cricket VP of product marketing Jeff Toig. "These are people under $50k household income, with no broadband Internet in their homes. This becomes their alternative to DSL or cable."

Cricket currently has 3.3 million customers in several dozen cities. They aim to double the size of the company by 2010, with Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington coming on line soon, Toig said. The company's major business is flat-rate, unlimited voice plans, but they're looking at data services as a differentiator especially now that they're competing in some markets with MetroPCS, another flat-rate voice carrier.

While Cricket's $40/month rate is lower than other cell phone carriers' wireless Internet charges, the key isn't just price. It's that Cricket is the only carrier offering wireless PC Internet on prepaid, without credit checks or a contract commitment, Toig said.

Cricket's broadband service is available in several Texas cities, Las Vegas, Oklahoma City and St. Louis right now, and it's coming to all of Cricket's other cities by the end of the year.

Unlike the more expensive wireless broadband services from the big cell-phone carriers, Cricket's service has no usage cap - you can use it as much as you want, and the company actually encourages you to use it as your main method of Net access from home. There are only two things you can't do: run a server or make VOIP calls.

Other carriers have stressed about their networks becoming clogged with broadband users, but Cricket isn't too worried, Toig said.

"We've been building up network capacity to make sure it doesn't clog up the network. We're learning our way through this," he said.

Cricket Offering Prepaid Wireless Broadband - Yahoo! News

 

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