I'm not averse to rooting if that's the only way. But I'm wondering whether unlocking the phone would do anything?
It would allow you to use a non-AT&T SIM in the phone - that's all locking is about.
The other option would be to sell my Moto X and buy a developer edition.
Be careful. Even if the phone can do tethering, if you don't have a tethering account you're violating the contract's terms of service, so they can terminate the contract and charge you an early termination fee.
The other thing is I'm experiencing slow data speeds. I know Cricket throttles down to 8mbps, but I'm lucky to get 2.
The internet runs at about 2mbps these days. Your data from Cricket's gateway may be going at 9mbps, but that's burst speed. You get a packet at 8mbps, wait a while, get another packet at 8mbps, etc. Cricket can't control how fast they're getting the data from the server you're connecting to. If it's a little Windows 2000 computer on a phone line in the jungle, you're lucky to get 49kbps id you're the only one connected to it. OTOH, if you connect to speedtest.net, get a server pretty close (ping time less than 20ms), and the speed is still slow, there's probably a problem.
That's why you buy speed "up to xmbps". The provider, cable or cellphone, has no control of the internet, only of how fast they send the packets down "the last mile" to you. If they're receiving them at a 100kbps thruput, that's as fast as they can pass them on to you.
This is something that I've experienced before but only during work hours, generally in the afternoon. Now it seems to be slow all the time, with daytime speeds nearly unusable.
The internet keeps getting slower. (Try it on Christmas morning.) Then the lines are upgraded to handle more data. Then the lines fill up with more spam and get slower. Then ... etc. If unsolicited commercial spam email (UCE) could be charged back to the sender at, say, $1 per message, the internet would quadruple (at least) its speed overnight. But when it costs more for a glass of water than it costs to send out 2 million emails selling some product, it's going to keep getting worse. (You're used to almost being able to chat real-time via email. We used to wait at least 24 hours from the time we sent an email until it was delivered, so those of us who remember the early days just start a large download, then go watch TV.)
I did scratch up my SIM card while using a SIM cutter to cut my micro SIM to a nano SIM. It got stuck in the cutter and I had to yank it out. It still works, so I figured the scratches on the side didn't hurt it any. But, could it have affected the data speeds?
Nope. A SIM card either works or it doesn't.
I get the same slow speeds with the SIM back in the Nexus 5.
You'll get the same slow speeds on any phone connected to AT&T where you are. Come to where I am and you'll get 14mbps on a speed test. (But still about 2mbps maximum speed on a real file download.)
Maybe I'll write a guide on internet speeds. It's like water. If the water company supplies water to your house through a 1/4" pipe, and you connect a 4 foot pipe from there to your house, the water will rush down that 4 foot diameter pipe as fast as possible. But you're still getting a trickle, because the flow upstream is so slow. You could get bursts of 4 feet of water, 1/8" thick, every 20 seconds, so you're getting a 4 foot flow, but the total amount of time to fill up a swimming pool won't change. It's the same thing with th internet. You're getting bursts of 8mbps data, but the time it takes to "fill up" a 100MB file is the speed it takes at the 2mbps speed that Cricket is receiving the data (the thruput of the system).
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