My roommate has started working from home, which meant a tremendous increase in cellphone calls.  He nearly exceeded our 700 minute limit last month, so I started looking at new plans.  I came to discover that I could change plans and get 1500 minutes for $25 less each month, so I jumped at it.  Unfortunately, what they didn't tell me was that $15 of that was because the new plan didn't support my tethering plan, and there was no way to get it back.

Our primary ISP is often flaky, and with my roommate needing more bandwidth while working at home, I needed to find a new cellular broadband provider.  Cricket is cheap, but they don't offer service in this area, nor does AT&T or T-Mobile.  Sprint and Verizon have service here, but both have a 5 Gig bandwidth cap.  Only Alltel offers service here and unlimited bandwidth.  Alltel is in the process of being swallowed by Verizon, but you can still get a 2 year Alltel contract, so I signed up.  I'll have unlimited cellular data for 2 years, for about $55 more per month than I was paying for my old tethering plan.  Feh.

So far it's been pretty decent.  Ping rates are atrocious, around 100-200 ms, but the bandwidth is extremely good, about 1.5 Mbit down and 350 Kbit up.  The bandwidth is about on par with our primary ISP, though the ping rates are higher.