Help Tethering disconnecting on Android phone

[bugo]

First time caller. I have a rooted Samsung Galaxy Captivate Glide SGH-i927 AT&T phone with Cricket as the provider. I have a 20gb data plan. The phone is running Android version 2.3.5. When I tether it to my Windows 7 laptop the connection will work fine for a few minutes then randomly won't work for a few minutes then will start working again. It disconnects and reconnects over and over. The tethering option in Settings is checkmarked and remains so even when the connection fails. I have also used my phone as a wifi hotspot and the same thing happens, it connects then disconnects then connects ad nauseam. When it works it's plenty fast but the disconnection is frustrating. Does anybody have a solution? All apologies if the question has been asked before but I searched Google for several hours without finding a solution. I'm using the built in tethering/wifi software and not an external app. My thought is that there is a setting that I need to change on the phone (the computer works fine using my wifi at home so I suspect it is the phone causing the issues. Is there a third party tethering app that will get rid of this problem? Help!

 

[mikedt]

Does your carrier, Cricket specifically allow tethering as part of your data plan? You might have a 20gb plan, but it could be phone only, no laptops, unless you pay an extra tethering charge. I believe that some US carriers can be rather particular about that as well.

 

[Pugs1957]

Yes, they require $10 per month for tethering.

 

[bugo]

I went to the Cricket site and from what I was able to gather, the hotspot capability was only available on the "old" Cricket. Despite that, my phone is working as a hotspot, just not reliably.

 

[mikedt]

It's probably been done within Cricket's network, they're blocking the data. There are ways to detect if a phone is being used as a hotspot or not, like deep packet inspections, phone flags the network it's in tethering mode, etc.