Cricket Wireless Review – Should You Switch?

We recently switched over to Cricket Wireless and I am here to give you a complete Cricket Wireless Review and answer the question: should you switch to Cricket Wireless?

In this Cricket Wireless review I will review our personal experience with Cricket and cover the good, the bad, and the ugly!  Read on to see if Cricket Wireless is right for you!

 

Cricket Wireless Phone Selection And Bring Your Own Device

We chose to buy a new phones through the Cricket Wireless website.  This was because my wife’s old phone had a severely cracked screen from being accidentally dropped.  She made it more than two years without cracking the screen – so that is pretty good 🙂  For me, I decided to upgrade because I was among the 1% of the folks that still had a super-old-slide-phone with a button keyboard for texting 🙂

We decided to get four Samsung Galaxy Grand Primes (two for us and two for the in-laws) for $129 each.  This phone seems to be a really good value for the money.  I can do just about everything that other phones running at $500+ can do.  We somehow missed the boat, because the stores are currently running a special on these for $99 if you port over your number from another carrier.

We were told by the local Cricket Wireless store sales guys that we could bring unlocked phones from AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.  I know that Cricket Wireless is actually owned by AT&T, so that should be no issue.  If you plan to bring your own device, make sure you check with the Cricket Wireless store first to ensure it will work!

For this section of the Cricket Wireless review, I would give the Cricket Wireless phone selection an A.  This is the good of our experience.  They have a lot of great phones available to fit any budget.  If you aren’t happy with the devices the Cricket Wireless store or website offers, you can always buy your own phone from Amazon or eBay and get it setup.

Setting Up a New Cricket Wireless Account in the Store

Here’s where things start to get a little bit bad…  I was able to convince my dad and mother-in-law to get a smart phone (the 5th phone to share between them) while they were recently visiting us.  The way the Cricket Wireless pricing works, you can get service on the 5th phone absolutely free.  It’s $100/month for the basic plan with four phones and $100/month for the basic plan with five phones!

No problem I thought.  We will just stop by the store and be good to go after ~15 minutes.  Holy shit was I wrong!  They were able to port my mother-in-laws phone number from TrakPhone in only about five minutes.  So far so good – or so I thought.  We spent the next 3 HOURS in the store while they tried to get the transaction to complete in their computer system.  There were all kinds of issues that the Cricket Wireless representative blamed on a power outage the day before?

Anyways, after he was on Cricket Wireless chat and called about five different managers, the issue was finally resolved.  The icing on the cake was when he still wanted to charge me the standard in-store $25 activation fee.  Are you fucking kidding me?  We waited more than three hours!  I was able to get him to waive this $25 fee very quickly when I raised a stink about it 🙂

For this part of the Cricket Wireless review, I give the Cricket Wireless new account setup in the store a D-minus.  It should not take more than 3 hours to switch to Cricket Wireless.  This was the bad….  Yes keep reading to find out how things can get even worse!

Cricket Wireless Number Porting

OK – without getting too wordy, here’s where things start to get bat-shit insane when switching to Cricket Wireless.  Keep in mind we were switching from AT&T to Cricket Wireless.  I point this out because Cricket Wireless is owned by AT&T…

Here’s a summary of the hellish time we had in porting our numbers from AT&T to Cricket Wireless:

• My wife’s phone and my phone ported with no issues – this is good 🙂
• I spoke with 14 different technical representatives over the course three days for a total of more than 7 hours to try and get my in-laws’ phones ported.  It still was not resolved – I was told I would HAVE to go into the Cricket Wireless store to get the problem resolved!
• We went to the local Cricket Wireless store and spent more than three hours trying to get the numbers ported!
• In the end, Cricket Wireless could not get the two numbers ported from AT&T!  My in-laws elected to get brand-new wireless phone numbers vs. waiting any longer (it had been over five days at this point)!

After 10+ hours of bullshit getting switched over to Cricket Wireless, I thought the fun was over.  Boy was I wrong!

Because my In-laws numbers could not be ported over, I had to call AT&T to cancel out our account since we were fully moved over to Cricket.  Normally when a port goes through, this is all taken care of automatically for you.  We were not so lucky, so I called up AT&T.  I was told by an AT&T representative that they could not cancel my account since there were two pending port in-process!  You know – those two ports that never actually worked for more than a week!  Guess who was supposed to cancel the porting request in the store?  That’s right – Cricket Wireless!  Now, they were holding our numbers that we were not even using any longer hostage!!!!

After 2+ hours on the phone with AT&T and getting put in touch with an AT&T manager, I was assured the issue would be corrected promptly.  I was called back later that night by the AT&T manager which had setup a 3-way call with a Cricket Wireless representative….

I was told by the Cricket Wireless representative that I would have to go into the Cricket Wireless store to actually cancel the port…………  Well, after 12+ hours of trying to work through all of this crap with Cricket Wireless I had had enough of it.  Enough I tell you!  I let the expletives fly and made it very clear to the Cricket Wireless rep and the AT&T manager that the problem would be resolved now and that I would not be going into any Cricket Wireless store any time soon.  I was called back early the next morning to be informed that AT&T had closed the account and that we could make our final partial-payment to close out the account 🙂

In summary, I would give Cricket Wireless a F-minus (if there were such a thing) for wireless number porting!  This is the ugly of it and was insane that any consumer should have to go to this amount of trouble to hand a company their money!  

Cricket Wireless – Referral Bonus

Now that we’ve got the ugly out of the way, we can move on.  Cricket Wireless does offer a nice referral bonus.  If someone refers you, each of you get a $25 credit on your account.  That seems pretty neat!  I was told that if we port over five numbers, we each get the credit five times!  That sounds a little too good to be true, but we will see if it actually comes through.

I signed up for the referral with a friend, but the credits have yet to come through and there is no email or anything (as promised from the referral website) since we activated our accounts.  As such, I will need to call Cricket Wireless to check up on things and ensure we are getting the credit.

Hopefully this entire process will not take more than 15 minutes, but given my previous experience with number porting I think this could also be a huge pain in the butt get straightened out!  I will keep my fingers crossed.

I give the referral bonus a C as of now due to the fact that I will have to manually intervene (call Cricket Wireless) to receive the referral bonus promised.  I plan to update this section once I have more information on if Cricket Wireless will honor the bonus and properly apply it.

Cricket Wireless Savings and Value for Your Money

This is the one section of the Cricket Wireless review where Cricket Wireless gets an A+ in my book.  Their prices are great and the call/data service we have experienced so far are also great.  Here’s a brief comparison of the package we had with AT&T vs. what we now have with Cricket.

Service	Monthly	Annual	Data	# Phones
AT&T	$148	$1,776	3 GB	4
Cricket Wireless	$100	$1,200	12.5 GB	5

Here are some additional fun facts:

• We save $576 a year over AT&T when switching to Cricket Wireless.
• Our price per GB of data is now $8 vs. $49.33 for AT&T!
• Our final price per phone is $20 vs. $37 for AT&T (and that $37 price is when three of the five phones were NOT smart phones)!

In the end, this is the main reason why we switched to Cricket Wireless and why we were willing to put-up with all the bullshit to properly switch over to their service.

Cricket Wireless Data – Is It Good?

So far I have had no issues at all with Cricket Wireless data.  It is fast and responsive.  For this Cricket Wireless review on data, I would give them an A.  I have experienced no issues so far.

Cricket Wireless Review – So Should You Switch?

Let’s summarize first by looking at the Cricket Wireless report card which outlines the sections above:

Cricket Wireless Review Breakdown	Grade
Phone Selection and Bring Your Own Device	A
Account Setup in Store	D-
Number Porting	F-
Referral Bonus	C
Value for Your Money	A+
Wireless Data	A

For this Cricket Wireless review I went on a bit of a rant there on porting over our cell phone numbers.  As you can see, it took over 12+ hours to fully make the switch over to Cricket Wireless for our five phones.  No normal person would have put-up with this level of garbage customer service!  We were able to stick through it, and should enjoy the savings going forward.  With all things we had to deal with factored in, I would give Cricket Wireless a grade of a C-minus.  The only reason it passed is because of its great monthly prices and decent call/data service.  Their “computer systems” and “support/technical representatives” are scraping the bottom of the barrel for sure…

So, should you switch to Cricket Wireless?  If you are a patient person and are really after the savings, then I would recommend making the switch to Cricket Wireless.  However, we had a 40% success-rate on switching our phones over.  I would expect that there is a pretty good chance if you try to switch you will run into some kind of issue at some point.  If things get screwed up too badly like they did for us, you may also lose your current cell phone number if you are not patient enough to wait more than a week!  So, ensure you have 2-3+ hours to deal with things before making the switch in case something goes wrong.  If you are not the patient type of person and don’t like dealing with hassle or multi-hour phone support calls, you may be sticking with your current cell phone provider.

If I had to do things all over again, would I switch to Cricket Wireless?  Probably, I would.  The savings are just too good to pass up from my perspective.  One thing I would do differently would be to have paid the in-store activation fee and gone into the Cricket Wireless store.  This may have saved us some of the headache with the different Cricket computer systems not properly “talking” to each other at the cost of ~$100.  With all the crap we went through this would equal out to ~$8 / hour of our time.  Definitely worth it to minimize the hassle.