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 Review by LordFlux 
UPDATED: 1.2 years ago
member for 4.6 years, 716 visits, last login: a few minutes ago
 Dublin,Laurens,GA
 $59 per month
 "Faster than dial-up | Easy installation | Fairly reliable connection"
 "Technical support is useless | Occasional connection drop for no reason"
 "Good for rural locations (with no wired broadband) | Better than sat. IMO"
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I've been using a 28.8 dial-up modem since 1996 to connect to the Internet. I tried satellite back in 2001 and was very unsatisfied with the speed and FAP. So I just decided to stick with dial-up until DSL or Cable was available at my location (which is in a rural part of central Georgia near Dublin).
Well I just happened to be doing research for a school project and I ran across Alltel's Axcess Broadband. I was familiar with cellular 1xRTT networks (having used my Sprint phone to get on the Internet several times), but unfamiliar with the new EVDO standard. One thing that I was wanting to avoid, though, was being locked into a 1-2 year contract. So after doing more research, I found out that if I were to purchase a data card from another vendor, then pay to have it activated at the local Alltel store, I would not be locked into a contract. However, since this would be my only device using the Alltel network, the monthly cost would be $79.99. Luckily, my father has an Alltel cell phone and we activated the card under his account -- so the monthly cost is $59.99.
When doing research and talking with the local Alltel representatives, they told me that my area was currently only 1xRTT, but EVDO was coming soon. This was back in March of '07. In early July of '07, EVDO became active -- but not without issues.
While they were doing upgrades to the towers, my connection was completely useless for about 3 weeks. Called the local Alltel store and also the technical support phone number. The local store was unaware of what was going on and the technical support representative on the phone was telling me that my Kyocera KR1 Router was bad. The connection had been stable at 150k download/100k upload until that time, so I decided to just wait to see if the issue cleared itself up. After 3 weeks, I started cruising at 900k download/150k upload.
The connection would still sporatically drop me for no apparent reason, but after doing more research and manually updating my PRL, the connection seems a good bit more stable. I'm using a Kyocera KR1 Router and a Kyocera KPC650 data card. There are 7 computers attached to my network and also a PS3 and an XBox360. The connection latency doesn't allow gaming online, but I am able to download items from Live MarketPlace and the Sony Store.
I've been very satisfied with the service, except for the period of time when the card would not connect at all (during the EVDO upgrades). I would have been okay with it if Alltel knew more about what was going on with their network, but instead, I was left in the dark. However, I am very glad the network is now EVDO capable and the speeds are impressive compared to my old 28.8 modem. In my opinion, EVDO is the way to go if you live in an area that doesn't have DSL or Cable.
UPDATE 2/12/2008 : We are no longer using a Kyocera KR1 Router and Kyocera KPC650. Now we are using a CradlePoint CTR350 and Kyocera KPC680. The connection is rock solid stable and we get consistent 1.2mbit download/150k upload transfer speeds.
UPDATE 9/06/2008: DSL is finally available in the area, so we are cancelling the Alltel Axcess subscription. We had great success with their service and never had a problem with it. Funny thing is -- my BellSouth 1.5Mbit DSL speeds are almost equal to the Alltel Axcess speeds. After doing a speedtest with DSL, I'm getting 1.2mbit download/250k upload. But of course the latency is much better, allowing XBox Live to work flawlessly.
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Review by delta_queen
UPDATED: 1.4 years ago
member for 1.8 years, 24 visits, last login: 50 days ago
Searcy,White,AR
$60 per month (12 month contract)
 about 3 days
"I may be going to satellite now. had a good 3 months with alltel"
"tower congested recently? poor connectivity"
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other options where I am moving > satellite or dialup
speed> they promote UP TO 2.5 Mb (I have found 600 without additional antenna)
price>$200 for the USB gizmo (UT Starcom), $60/month after that, 1 yr contract
Install process> received USB gizmo in 2 days, ran install disk, stuck in the USB antenna
I am moving to an rural area where the only two options are satellite and EVDO - at this time and from the results of my research.... After getting hives reading all about satellite service and restrictions, I read a review here about Alltel broadband in rural MS. (I am moving to rural AR) I ordered my starcom and tried it out for 3 days this weekend. WHAT A RELIEF! Yes my comcast cable will be sorely missed, but you were quite right, "when nothing else is available, this is an excellent choice". Without a booster antenna I am receiving 600-150 up down (inside a metal building). This will certainly do considering there are no restrictions for usage. I intend to research booster antennas next and will report back here.
UPDATE 4.16.2008
Four months into contract. Still a happy cusomter. Only one outage (for a couple of hours) in four months. Speeds are consistant with 600 down/100up. A tech told me yesterday that ALL towers were going to be upgraded soon.
Usage really is unlimited. youtube not a prob. Upload is pokey though and one of my corporate VPNs didn't work with this service, but another one did. Customer service really is tops with Alltel, can't think of another telecom company that has ever come close to their quality.
UPDATE 5.26.2008
The past 5 weeks, I have had terrible connection problems. The rssi jumps around all over the place. Many instances I can't even connect or am disconnceted. The first 4 months were SMOOTH sailing with Alltel Axcess. Now this product isn't worth 0.02. I've had an offical ticket open for almost 2 weeks and have never gotten one call from a tech. I have to call back in every other day to check status and explain myself all over again. "Possible tower congestion" I am looking into dropping Alltel and giving satellite a go. How sad.
Update: 6.12.08
I've made the switch to wildblue. Alltel was great for three months, then traffic got too much on my local tower and during peak hours I couldn't use the service AT ALL. and it was mostly too problematic at other hours. I loved Alltel at the start and they have super polite customer service, alas no one would do any thing abo0ut my connectivity issues over the last 7 weeks. PS; heard Verizon was going to be taking over, so it's a good time to bail.
Update 6.23.08
Just ended my service officially. Alltel did not make me pay for the time I had my trouble ticket open (30+ days). But I will owe the remaining $150 - to end the contract.
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Review by MarthaG
UPDATED: 1.5 years ago
member for 2 years, 105 visits, last login: 34 days ago
Kimbolton,Guernsey,OH
$59 per month (24 month contract)
about 30 days
"Getting Better"
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My connection is getting better. Maybe they have fixed the problem. Hopefully now it will stay stable.
Over the last few weeks my speed went from excellent to very poor. I have talked to tec support and I never get the same answer. If you can accept how unstable the speeds are it is fine but the cost for slow speeds is not worth it in my opinion. I will stay with Alltel until something better comes along but I find it very disappointing.
On and off for a month or so my Franklin CDU-550 would drop down to slow speeds and the technican told me to trade it out because they had some problems with the Franklin CDU-550 and they gave me a UM150 and I am very pleased with the speeds I am getting now. The UM150 seems like an excellent product.
I was a HughesNet customer for many years and it was a good service until it went from DirecWay to HughesNet. I had no other options until Alltel Axcess became available. I have a good connection now with very little disconnect problems. I can recommend this service to others. I am using the Franklin CDU-550.
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 Review by ansar
UPDATED: 1.5 years ago
member for 4.9 years, 754 visits, last login: 5 days 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"
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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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Review by .
Posted: 1.6 years ago
(review was emailed in)
undisclosed location
Contract price not specified.
"Better than HughesNet"
"Painfully slow at times, disconnets and goes dormant - A LOT"
"Still prefer it to Hughes and it's less than half the price per month"
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We had HughesNet for 4 years and then they changed their Fair Access Policy without any notice to their customers. We ditched them for Alltel last July. And I would NEVER EVER recommend HughesNet to anyone. You will be sorry and broke. So as far as the Alltel wireless service. I'm not thrilled with it but at least it's not so ridiculously expensive that I feel we're gettin totally screwed. It's just okay.
There are times during the day that it's quite fast and other times when it is much slower than even dial up. We get a lot of disconnects and phone (Motorola V3m) going dormant even though we could be right in the middle of something. Every time we call we're told it's a Vista problem. I don't know if that's true or not but customer service is basically non-existent for this service. You're pretty much on your own getting it up and running and for the average person with just basic computer knowledge that can very difficult. So all in all I wouldn't say Alltel is terrible because Hughes was worse and way more expensive but I would ditch it if we had anything better available. Right now us folks living way out in the boonies (3 whopping miles from town) have few options for decent internet. Feel like we're in the stone ages sometimes...
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Review by ncone1952
UPDATED: 1.6 years ago
member for 3.4 years, 948 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Wallace,Duplin,NC
$59 per month (24 month contract)
"Overall good speed decent latency"
"none"
"I like it"
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I have the UM150 without an antenna/amp or router.
I have maxed out at 1.2-1.8 mbs down and 150 kbs up. My rssi ranges from a low of 78 one time to usually 83-99
I intend to go to an Alltell Retail Store to purchase the correct antenna and amplifyer. I have 35 ft of distance for cable from antenna to computer.
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Review by djheath
UPDATED: 1.6 years ago
member for 2.8 years, 564 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Gladys,Campbell,VA
$59 per month (24 month contract)
about 1 days
"Only Broadband access currently at my house besides Sattelite, can use it anywhere"
"Slower then other Broadband solutions"
"It works for what I can get. Will keep once DSL is available for a backup."
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Unfortunately I am currently 1/2 mile from the service area of DSL in my town. I had Wildblue for a year but cancelled it as soon as the contract was up because the service sucked. I now have Alltel Axess broadband which went live with EVDO in my area at the end of December. I use the PPC6700 PDA as my access device since I have a MAC. My wife uses a PCMCIA card in her laptop. The service works well but the speed is not the same as a good DSL or Cable modem setup. My wife has used it traveling on the Sprint network to work remotely before and the service works well for this. It is also a nice backup if your main service goes out. Alltel and Sprint have a roaming agreement so that you can roam on Sprints network also. All in all this is a good service if you travel a lot or cannot get any other normal broadband connection at your house.
03/14/08
Alltel has updated the towers around the area and EVDO is even better then last year, I'm still hoping for DSL to be available but at the present time this connection is way better then anything else offered at my house.
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Review by mcrone
UPDATED: 1.7 years ago
member for 7.8 years, 50 visits, last login: 1.6 years ago
Monroe,Walton,GA
$40 per month (24 month contract)
about 14 days
 AllTel
"Modem delivery and setup time -- excellent"
"High packet loss (27%) -- unintelligible level 1 customer support"
"Considering returning to cable"
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We had internet service from local ISP cable provider. Their equipment would be down too frequently and since my business depends on the connectivity, we switched to Alltel DSL when it became available. Connectivity with Alltel has been good, but their line quality and/or router reliability seems questionable. Download speeds are great, but packet loss is so high that streaming audio/video is interrupted and sometimes dropped. Not good. Can't get the level tech support folks attention, plus can't understand much of what they say (language problem).
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 Review by dberdusco
UPDATED: 1.7 years ago
member for 3.8 years, 226 visits, last login: 16 days ago
Phoenix,Maricopa,AZ
$25 per month
about 1 days
"much cheaper than data card for the same avg speed"
"low upload"
"good for price"
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i had an aircard pc5740 for alltel contract expired. i inquired about tethering my laptop to my razr it was only 25 a month addtl so i added it and i have 4 laptops on my network connected to my cellphone and they all work good
the avg speed is 700kbps down 108kbps up
i was told i needed a data kit for my phone but i used a generic usb cable and drivers from the internet and it worked
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Review by jhoma
UPDATED: 1.7 years ago
member for 6.9 years, 62 visits, last login: 1.3 years ago
Harrison,Clare,MI
$25 per month
about 1 days
"For $25 it is worth 10x faster than dial up"
"frequent 500-1000 pings"
"I would recommend this if you can not get cable or dsl"
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I live 12 miles from a town of 2000, basically the middle of the sticks. It was this or satellite, for better than dial-up. My connection speed has steadily gotten better over the last 18 months. The hardware works and allows me to play mmo games with no real lag. The tech support people helped a lot to get it up and running. They are very knowledgeable. It has worked on any computer I have plugged it into. I am using a Motorola Razor on a (tether) usb cable. The only gripe I have is their customer service people couldn't t get my billing right for 6 months straight. I was being charged the $59 price month after month, when I should have been charged $25. I went into the Alltel store 3 times and every time they said oops we made a mistake , we can fix that, next bill would come and same problem. After the 3 months of face to face meetings at the store I started calling their customer service department this went on for 3 more months, I stuck in there and they finally fixed it. So tech support = Great/ customer support = Bozos from Hell.
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Alltel Axess
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thanks for your alltel report