 Review by ansar 
UPDATED: 225 days ago
member for 3.9 years, 528 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Utica,Hinds,MS
 $61 per month (24 month contract)
 about 2 days
 "Solid connection. I use it everyday all day."
 "Image proxy now being used!, Not RevA"
 "Excellent choice when nothing else available"
| Pre Sales Information:
Install process:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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*** Update ***
I lowered my rating in services from a 5 to a 3. Now that Alltel has implemented a proxy to serve up images while browsing, my browsing has gotten a lot slower.
Background:
My wife, son, and I recently moved out into the boonies to family land to be close to my parents and grandparents. We love it out here, but the problem has been trying to find a decent internet connection that is better than 24k dialup. My wife and I play EQ2 and use the internet heavily.
Other Internet trials:
We tried WildBlue satellite for a year. We were moderately satisfied, and the 600ms ping times were bearable. But when WildBlue introduced the new DAMA rules, we were no longer satisfied. I gave them 4 months to fix it, but finally cancelled in frustration. I began looking into other means of getting internet. I even considered starting my own little WISP and get a T1 to my house and split the connection with some neighbors. But the distance to neighbors and the Mississippi trees talked me out of it.  I went ahead and ordered 4 phone lines to my house. I multilinked the 4 phone lines into two 57.6k connections, where my wife got one and I got the other. This was ok, for awhile, but we were still not satisfied. Then one day I came across EVDO....
Verizon and Sprint EVDO:
My company has several Verizon Wireless data cards, so I borrowed one and slapped it into my laptop and headed to my house. I could only 1xRTT at my house and it wasn't much better than satellite. I checked out Sprint, but they didn't offer any services in Mississippi. Then one day I came across something in the news that Alltel and Sprint signed a roaming agreement for EVDO. After checking out Alltel's website, it appeared that there might be one tower that was EVDO capable near my house. I figured I would go with Sprint since it was a bigger company, but I was later to learn that this was a mistake. I immediately signed up with Sprint and got the Pantech PX500 from my local Sprint store and then ordered a Trucker omni and adapter from 3gstore. After I got home, it took me a little bit of trial and error to find the best place for my antenna, but after that I was golden. My wife and I were back in the modern era, even if it was only Rev0 EVDO. Towards the end of the first month with Sprint right before my trial period was up, we had an outage. This is when I realized, who should I call, Alltel or Sprint, to report the outage? At that point, I decided to take the Sprint card back and switch to Alltel. Man am I glad I did.
Alltel EVDO:
I went to the Alltel store and got the UTStarcom PC5750, since it is almost the exact same card as the Pantech and should be RevA capable when it is available. I hooked it to my external antenna and put it in my server. The first thing I noticed was that my ping times had dropped by half and according to speedtests my download and upload had doubled. Look at my tracerts from this post: »www.evdoforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=5713 Notice that my times doubled after the first hop on the Alltel tower. My guess is there is some overhead going on from switching from Alltel to the Sprint network.
Usage:
My wife and I can play EQ2 now while raiding and using teamspeak/ventrillo with very little problems. She is able to watch YouTube and most streaming videos now from other sites now. Regular web surfing and VPN work great.
Outages/Tech Support Calls:
We have had two outages since I have had the Alltel service. One was just a few hours and the other was for a whole day. Both times Alltel's Data Tech Support was wonderful. You have to wait on the phones for 20 to 30 minutes, but I have always gotten someone at least with a little clue at what they were doing. After talking to them about the outage that lasted a day, they said they had to do a truck roll and had to physically go to the tower.
So far I am completely satisfied with my service from Alltel.
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Alltel Axess
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thanks for your alltel report