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Review by delta_queen 
UPDATED: 30 days ago
member for 193 days, 16 visits, last login: 3 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 armyvet
Posted: 60 days ago
member for 1.7 years, 380 visits, last login: 5 days ago
Maceo,Daviess,KY
$80 per month (24 month contract)
about 1 days
"everything so far,and much much better then att"
"nothing yet"
 "check this service first, and when your contract is up"
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my only regret about leaving att after 17 years, i should have done this sooner
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Review by MarthaG
UPDATED: 77 days ago
member for 271 days, 55 visits, last login: 4 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: 93 days ago
member for 3.6 years, 449 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"
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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 pioneer56
Posted: 104 days ago
member for 126 days, 116 visits, last login: a few hours ago
US
$60 per month (24 month contract)
about 1 days
"Better than dialup and Hughesnet"
"Inconsitant speeds and slow downs in the evening"
"I am staying with it until dsl comes sometime in the next decade around here!"
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I like it when it is working about 80 % of the time, but it has odd slowdowns and I have great signal reception. May have to talk to tech support if it keeps up. Still, it is better than Hughes and far better than dialup.
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Review by .
Posted: 113 days 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 Jeepster93
UPDATED: 116 days ago
member for 7.7 years, 1360 visits, last login: 2 days ago
Springfield,Greene,MO
$50 per month (24 month contract)
about 1 days
"Fast Speed and Great Signal"
"pricey"
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KPC680 with Cradlepoint MBR1000 and its great. Also reduced price as my employer uses Alltel. I would highly recomend Axess. Easy to setup and fast.
The router was simple to setup and works fantastic.
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Review by ncone1952
UPDATED: 116 days ago
member for 2.1 years, 597 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 DemonChicken
UPDATED: 123 days ago
member for 1.7 years, 164 visits, last login: 8 days ago
Boon,Wexford,MI
$60 per month
"Faster than Dial Up"
"Working, happens infrequently, more often, its terrible"
"Avoid, with the exception that it can be Better than Dial up... sometimes."
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The max speed I ever get and stay at is about 500kbps. When downloading some things it loads for about 2 seconds drops to 0kbps and starts again, I do not know why it does this, I have swapped out the modem and it still has the same problems it had before the switch. Do not get this internet service unless you desire to disconnect every hour or less.
I do not know what causes all these problems, Some days it will not disconnect at all during the time I am on the computer, to date, that has probably been about 5 days total, max. I got this service near November of last year, there seems to have been no fluctuations in quality of service, It has always been poor.
Customer Service was nice helpful and friendly and did not treat me like I was an idiot. At least the man with the southern accent was. I cannot recall his name. He should be commended.
There was a slight case of lying to me while I was buying the service, they told me adapters for PCMCIA to PCI cards were $200, as I thought at the time, they are about $10-$20. The USB modem we have (CDU-550) COULD be the problem, however, I would recommend, that if ALL you do online, is download and check email, and non latency requiring tasks, that satellite MAY be a better option, if you are willing to pay the outrageous install costs and service costs.
In my experience, gaming can be possible, sometimes I will ping to a server on Team Fortress 2 for 180, A very playable ping especially for a person like me who is used to high ping, however after playing at that "good" ping, my usual of 250+ was unplayable.
Sometimes my service will drop to 0kbps for no reason, and then it will disconnect, instancing in WoW being one of the two off tanks with no main tank was not what I or my group would prefer.
I can honestly say I wish that I had never discovered this service, and that I just had dial up, at least then I would not disconnect so much.
I cannot wait for charter, as I read in a review from them, a review disconnected only every 2 hours, and that that was unacceptable. There has been some tree cutting on each side of the road around my area, I am not sure if it is for the installing of cable or so cars can see further at intersections, I would prefer it be the former, however with my luck I'm almost sure it is the latter. I would prefer that over disconnecting every >20 minutes. For an example, I just disconnected while writing this review, after 15 minutes of a connection.
The longest time it has ever been connected is 12 hours, and that was idle, while it was doing nothing.
In conclusion, avoid this service in Michigan. Heck Avoid it if at all possible. If you know a better service is coming to your area, DSL/Cable, Fixed Wireless, and less likely WiMax, wait for that, do not subject your self to this terrible service.
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Review by djheath
UPDATED: 128 days ago
member for 1.5 years, 309 visits, last login: 3 days 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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Alltel Axess
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thanks for your alltel report