I recently switched from T-Mobile to Cricket as my wireless phone carrier. I’ve been using a prepaid plan ever since I got my first smartphone a couple of years ago. It’s great not to have to worry about overages or contracts!
However, not everything is always smooth sailing when switching carriers. In my case, I had trouble with my HTC 8X Windows Phone not receiving group texts or MMS messages after I put in my new Cricket SIM.
Whenever I got one of these messages, it would have only a link saying, “get media content now”. If I tapped the link, it would say, “getting media content”, but after a few seconds it would switch back and no content would appear.
Searching online and contacting Cricket support gave me the following APN settings:
APN: ndo
Proxy: Not Set
Port: Not Set
Username: Not Set
Password: Not Set
Server: Not Set
MMSC: http://mmsc.aiowireless.net
MMS Proxy: proxy.aiowireless.net
MMS Port: 80
MCC: 310
MNC: 150
Authentication type: Not Set
APN type: default,mms,fota,hipri,supl
However, the Windows Phone APN settings don’t include all of the relevant fields! Therefore I wasn’t able to enter information like the MMS Proxy or the MCC and MNC numbers.
It turns out that Windows Phone 8 will automatically set certain APN settings based on the carrier associated with your SIM. However, it only does this the first time the phone is started, and won’t change them if you swap out the SIM later. I didn’t want to reset my phone, so I started looking for some way to update the settings.
In the end, I found that HTC makes an app called Connection Setup, which will update the appropriate settings. I downloaded it, thinking that I’d be home free!
One last wrinkle: the Connection Setup app hasn’t been updated in a while (big surprise there), and doesn’t have Cricket as one of its carrier options. However, looking at the APN settings that Cricket wanted me to use, I noticed that it was using aiowireless.net. AIO Wireless recently merged with Cricket, and AIO was owned by AT&T. I tried using the AT&T carrier in the connection setup app, restart my phone, and… it worked! Now I can send and receive group text and pictures with Cricket on my T-Mobile HTC 8X.