I’ve been a Cricket Wireless sucker for 4 years, paying $30 a month, every month, for 10gb of 4gLTE data.

It’s been mostly okay service, I liked that there are plenty of stores around me I can go to if I have a problem or if I want to get a new phone, etc.

There are some glaring deadzones I’ve experienced with Cricket coverage (which is basically AT&T cheap tier coverage because of their partnership). I’ve driven across the country 4 times in 4 years with Cricket and never had service in huge parts of Wisconsin, Michigan, the Dakotas, and, strangely, most of Tahoe, California.

When my friend Bryan, the guy who got me into crypto in the first place, told me about MOBILE and switching his phone carrier about a month ago, I was hesitant at first to follow suit. My Helium IoT miner never made much IoT (it did earn a bit of HNT before the Solana Mainnet merge) and I was afraid I was going to have shit service with MOBILE in addition to unforeseen potential headaches transferring my old phone number out to Helium Mobile from Cricket.

So how is it so far?

2 weeks ago I bit the bullet and order the Helium Mobile SIM card for my old motorola phone and 3 days ago it arrived. For $20 a month on Mobile, I’ve been earning $MOBILE just having my phone using it normally. Enabling the Discovery Mapping option in the HeliumMobile app allows you to earn the $MOBILE and seems to increase your earnings marginally as you drive around, mapping more hexes for the network to analyze. I paired my phone service with my Helium Mobile Indoor Hotspot miner and I’ve been earning about $2.50 a day at current MOBILE prices just on my phone and another $2.50 a day on my miner which I think is fantastic! So, at current prices, that’s $1750 a year in earned $MOBILE just for doing nothing other than using my phone and keeping my hotspot on.

Switching from Cricket was so easy actually - I just requested my PIN to release my phone number from cricket and continued in the HeliumMobile (the Orange-colored one) app after I had put my nano-SIM from Helium into my phone --→

After I put Helium Mobile’s nano-SIM into my old Motorola, I proceeded to follow the prompts on the Helium Mobile android app to port my number over (you provide your phone company’s personal ID for your account, your phone number (obviously) and your PIN for your personal number transfer to Helium. It was that simple!

Here are my current earnings just for the past 3 days I’ve had MOBILE up and running:

And here’s my current earnings with my indoor MOBILE miner from Helium (I paid $250 for this and it came 2 days before the SIM arrived):

Just as with the original Helium miners (now numbering 389,441 as of this edit), as more Mobile hotspots (indoor and outdoor CBRS) come online, the already solid T-Mobile 4gLTE coverage the Helium Mobile network runs on will get better, more robust.

This is my go-to constantly-updated map of all hotspots to give you an idea of how the network is growing. ---→

If you’re interested in switching to a better phone plan that actually pays you to be on on the largest publicly-owned data network, sign-up with Helium Mobile using my referral code so you get $5 off your bill and I get $5 off mine!!