Does Consumer Cellular include a hot spot?

[magicbus]

I’m in the process of retiring… seems like it would be easier to keep working! AARP made me aware of Consumer Cellular and it to seems like a good deal. We need AT&T towers because it’s all that works at home, but we also need hotspots on our phones. Does Consumer Cellular include hit spots?

Dave

[magicbus]

Thanks everyone for the information. I’ve been so busy working out retirement details I forgot I had actually posted this instead of having it rattling around in my head!

Dave

[RedRollingRoadb]

My only complaint with CC is that lot of the time text messages are slow, real slow. 15 minuets or so slow. Just the other day I got a message "Your message to Wife failed to send. Sent 74 days ago." Or another one that was 363 days ago. Gee, ya think I figured it out 362 days ago?

Oh, yeah you got to call them to get the hotspot turned on. I think you need to call from a different phone than the one you want it turned on as they will have you reboot the other one to see if it took.

[NCBounder]

One of our phones is on Consumer Cellular. It's a good deal. The phone is a low end Android and we occasionally use the hotspot feature on it. If you go over your plan amount of data CC automatically upgrades you to the next level instead of nickle/dimeing you for over use. We cover the waterfront, one phone on ATT (Consumer Cellular) one phone on Visible (Verizon) and a T-mobile/Sprint Hotspot. Unless you're boondocking somewhere really remote, usually one of the services works.

[1492]

According to this article, "Although Consumer Cellular offers Wi-Fi Calling and Personal Hotspot, you have to ask the company’s customer service to enable them."

"When you contact Consumer Cellular to get your SIM fully activated, I recommend requesting Wi-Fi Calling and Personal Hotspot at the same time. Not only will it save you another call, but it’ll also save a bit of hassle since you have to restart your iPhone each time a new feature is turned on. Also, when Consumer Cellular first activated Personal Hotspot, it turned off Wi-Fi Calling on my iPhone, and I had to turn it back on again in Settings."

[rexlion]

I think hotspots are specific to the brand/model of phone. My Samsung A01, purchased from CC a couple months ago as a replacement for an older Sony phone, does have the hotspot feature.

My previous phone was a Sony, provided by me (CC didn't offer Sonys). Buying a phone elsewhere is an option so long as it's ATT compatible, but it does take a little extra to set up the phone properly (CC sets up ahead of time the phones they sell and ship). I couldn't figure out how to make my Sony work until I wrote to CC and they sent me instructions on what I had to change or enter at certain key places.