Cricket's no-contract, no-commitment $40-per-month EV-DO service is the best deal in cellular broadband you can find. The low-cost carrier's new USB Broadband Modem A600 provides a few more features than the older UM100 model, although the new modem wasn't any faster on my tests.

Cricket's EV-DO network works on the 850-, 1,900-, and 1,700-MHz bands, depending upon your location. It covers many major cities, including Philadelphia, Chicago, Las Vegas, and San Diego, as well as some smaller cities such as Tucson, Arizona, and Wichita, Kansas, and a number of places in Texas. Cricket's EV-DO does not cover New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or anywhere in New England or Florida, however. You can find full coverage maps at www.mycricket.com.

A rounded, black USB dongle with green highlights, the 1.28-ounce A600 measures 3.36 by 1.43 by 0.51 inches (HWD); it's bigger than the latest Sprint and Verizon modems (like the Novatel Ovation U760, for example) but it doesn't feel huge. The USB port is tucked away behind a little sliding door. The A600's standout feature (and an unusual one) is its on-device signal indicator, which displays signal strength with four bars on the body of the modem itself. You also get a microSD memory card slot, but like many slots in EV-DO modems it transfers files at about one-tenth the speed of a dedicated card reader. There's no connector on the modem to attach external antennas.

The A600 works with Windows XP and Vista, or Mac OS 10.3.9 or later. Drivers and software are on the device. Plug it in and it pops up as a USB drive on your desktop with the installer application. Cricket's Windows connection application works relatively smoothly, and has a neat feature: It can connect in NDIS mode as well as dial-up mode, so the modem can appear as an Ethernet connection. The software also supports text messaging.

In seven rounds of tests conducted in different locations around Philadelphia, the A600's speed was extremely close to the UM100C's. That surprised me; like the latest modems on Sprint and Verizon, the A600 uses the relatively new Qualcomm QSC6085 chipset, but the UM100C uses the older MSM6800. Both modems had much lower speeds than the EV-DO Rev A technology allows, which makes me think speed is being regulated by Cricket's network, not by the devices.

The A600 delivered an average download speed of 538 kilobits per second and peaked at 787 Kbps, compared with the UM100C's average of 559 Kbps and peak of 739 Kbps. Those speeds resemble the ones for the older, slower EV-DO Rev 0 technology, but upload speeds show that this is really Rev A: The A600 averaged 502 Kbps and the UM100C 409 Kbps, whereas Rev 0 can run uploads at only around 153 Kbps.

Although Cricket has the same 5GB monthly data cap as other cellular carriers, unlike AT&T and Verizon, which threaten to charge you for additional data usage, Cricket just slows down your connection for the remainder of the month after you've reached the 5GB point. The carrier hasn't specified by how much, but my suspicion is that you'll find yourself with the equivalent of a 1X connection, or about 100 Kbps.

Our review unit showed some minor bugs that Cricket claims were firmware problems. Most notably, the installer crashed our MacBook Pro running Windows Vista (though it worked fine on a Toshiba Tecra laptop) and the PC application wouldn't report data transfer amounts or speeds in EV-DO mode. A newer version of the modem's firmware is already on the market that should solve those problems. Cricket is sending us a replacement, and we'll update this review with our findings in the coming weeks.

At $40 per month (versus the larger carriers' monthly service fee of $60) the Cricket USB Broadband Modem A600 is an affordable way to get your laptop online, as long as you're in a covered city. Here's hoping Cricket will speed up its network so this device can truly shine—and provide even more bang for the buck.

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