Cricket’s Local Global Number Connects Across Borders

So a couple of months ago the folks at Cricket contacted me with a proposal. They were ready to roll out their new Global Local Number feature and were wondering if I’d be interested in trialing this new service for the final quarter of 2011. Naturally, I said yes!

For one, I remember growing up my mom used to have to wait months in between calls to her family in Mexico because it was just way too expensive to place those llamadas any more frequently. Later, when those handy little calling cards came out it was always hit or miss trying to figure out which ones actually worked, and then keeping up with how many minutes they had left. I can’t tell you how many emergency runs to the local corner store we had to make to purchase another calling card. And then only certain ones would actually connect us to Cerritos, San Luis Potosi. Up until a couple of years ago there was literally one phone in the entire rancho! If you wanted to use it you had to pay Doña Leonor cinco pesos for every couple of minutes. Now, I think there are about four or five people with phones in El Sauz (our actual ranch in Cerritos), but you still have to pay to talk. Cell phone service only works in the loma at certain altitudes and directions.

Anyhow, at first I was a little confused about how this Global Local Number thing would work. Would they have to install new software on my phone? Would I have to carry a second phone around with me everywhere? I did not want to do either and it’s been years since we disconnected our land line. We never even had one at our current house. As it turns out, though, it was all very simple and I didn’t have to do anything besides tell them which city and state in Mexico I wanted a local phone number for. They did the rest. Somehow across their network they assigned my local Houston cell (the same one I’ve always used) a local number for San Luis Potosi. Now all I had to do was give that number to my relatives in San Luis and wait for them to call me. I was pretty impressed they could give me a local number en mi rancho, jaja!

The only thing I couldn’t do was call them directly myself because my phone after all was still a Houston phone. In essence I guess, they were forwarding the calls to the local San Luis Potosi number assigned to me to my Houston cell. That’s just me guessing, so don’t take my word for it.

So then it was time to chismear. A quick side note here, I actually did not have that many calls because, as I’ve discovered, most of my family is now here and there really weren’t that many people over there to call me. The few calls I did get, however, were pretty clear and non-problematic. They lasted longer than usual because there wasn’t the typical concern about how expensive the call might turn out for either party. I filled up my morral with puro chisme and really found the Global Local Number pretty useful. The only thing I wish I would have been able to do was make some calls to San Luis Potosi myself, using this same feature.

All in all, it was a great experience. Not too mention a lot of fun hearing all of the chisme from the rancho so easily.

For more information about Cricket’s Global Local Number visit mycricket.com.

Disclosure: Cricket’s Global Local Number was made available for me to use for review purposes. All opinions are my own.