Back around the end of July, I made the mistake of changing my cellular service over to sprint.
Sure I loved the new samsung galaxy nexus phone, and 4G cellular was great in the 4 or 5 places I could get a 4G signal at in the Roswell / Alpharetta Georgia area (none of which were at my home where I could barely get 2 bars of 3G service). Combine this with having a lot of trouble with their 3G network where I would have full signal strength but wouldn't be able to access anything on the data network, which was absolutely fricking ridiculous.
Well at the end of December I was completely fed up, and I started researching on finding a cheaper way to have decent cell service. See, I used to have AT&T which gave me great coverage, but their policies on data usage sucked. I rarely go over 1 1/2 to 2GB of data usage per month, but when I had to spend 4 days in the hospital and only had my cell phone for internet usage I racked up a whopping 2.1GB of data and got charged an extra 20 dollars on my bill, which prompted me to look for something with unlimited data. Having unlimited data plus the supposedly great 4G coverage Sprint advertises suckered me into signing up with them.
Anyways, after some research I decided to go with the Net10 BYOD (Bring Your own Device) unlimited plan using one of their AT&T compatible sim cards and my old Samsung Captivate phone that I still have. You might say why in the hell are you going from such a nice phone like the galaxy nexus back to the captivate which has issues with the GPS lock not working very well, random shutdown issues, and in general just being an older model phone.
The answer is, I already own it, and that I'm also in the process of getting the needed parts in to repair a unlocked International model GT-I9250 GSM model Samsung Galaxy Nexus that I purchased off ebay that has a damaged micro USB charging port. I ordered the flex cable part with the usb connector on it that I will swap out after I take the phone apart.
Anyways back to the info about how to configure your APN for better download speeds with Net10 if you are using an AT&T sim.
I followed the instructions on setting up the APN on my captivate using the APN settings that Net10 gave me, but ran into issues with download speeds being very sub par, especially with me having a HSPDA signal with 4 bars on my phone.
thru a little trial and error I determined that the issue was with the proxy settings that net10 wanted me to use so I wanted to share the APN settings that gave me the best speeds both for uploads and downloads.
Name: NET10
APN: wap.tracfone
Proxy: not set
Port: not set
username: not set
server: not set
MMSC: http://mmsc.cingular.com
MMS proxy: not set
MMS port: not set
MCC: 310
MNC: 410
Authentication type: not set
apn type: not set
apn protocol : IPv4
Bearer: Unspecified.
the main differences between this and the settings that Net10 wanted me to use were the proxy, proxy port, mms proxy and mms port. Once I removed these I went from very slow download speeds of less than 100K per second, to nearly 3 MB per second download, and 1 MB per second upload speeds.
for cheap unlimited service this isn't bad, and by me setting it to auto renew every month on their website I was able to get my monthly service for $45 per month instead of $50.
You might be asking youself, now if he signed up with sprint back at the end of July, isn't he going to have to pay an ETF fee? Well the answer for that is yes, but I'm getting a nice refund back from the IRS and plan on using it to pay the ETF, and I plan on selling my phone after everything is settled and square for whatever I can get out of it, to help recover some of the ETF.
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