Review by CMoore2004 
UPDATED: 1.2 years ago
member for 5.9 years, 1198 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Jonesville,Hillsdale,MI
 $63 per month (24 month contract)
 about 2 days
 "Mobile, High Speed, Low Latency"
 "Sprint's Customer Support, Occasional tower outage (specific to my tower, though)"
 "I love it. Real broadband you can take on the road. Beats the satellite."
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(ratings match consensus)
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When ordering the service, I ordered it with two phones. The card came on time, and the phones were a different story. I was originally on 1xRTT at home, then they added the Sprint equipment to the nextel tower just a mile or two away. Now I get at least 600kbit down and 300kbit up with low latency. We were using two-way satellite before, and will be ditching HughesNet. I've got it shared among 3 computers and it performs very well. I can even do some online gaming with latency under 150ms.
Now, the bad part. Sprint's connection manager told me to do an update to the firmware. The update failed and rendered my card useless. Sprint wouldn't do anything for me, and I had to hound them for weeks. Eventually, executive services got me taken care of, but considering their software broke it, I never should have had such a problem. Occasionally, the tower will go down. I think it's a power issue with this specific tower, and doubt any other Sprint users will notice this. For some reason, the slightest storm takes out both the Sprint and Nextel signals, and has from the beginning.
I have recommended my sister to the service, and she is very happy with the service. She's only a few hundred feet from Frontier's CO, and they can't keep a DSL connection up, so she's with Sprint now. I've downloaded 15GB+ in a month and had no notices or anything of the nature so far.
The bottom line is that it's true mobile broadband. With Sprint upgrading the entire network this year, I can't think of a place I go where I couldn't get online at high speed. Being able to EVDO roam on Alltel is also a huge plus. I'm in the "sticks", and I think Sprint is really going to be a hard hit for HughesNet and WildBlue, at least the residential portion. I absolutely love having broadband, even with being in a contract for 2 years. Sprint's coverage maps are out of date. If you don't seem to be in an EVDO area, just try it out for 30 days risk-free, especially if you can get a sprint phone signal. The entire network should be upgraded by Q3 2007.
Update - 3/23/2007
The tower that the EVDO equipment is now on used to be only Nextel and would always lose power during electrical storms (or I assume it was losing power, as every Nextel phone would lose service), and I've been experiencing slow speeds since the last electrical storm (about two days ago). Usually, I lose service entirely and then it comes back in good working order. This time I wasn't around to know if I completely lost service, but when I got home from work I saw the connection had been dropped and reestablished, and then tried browsing only to find ridiculously slow speeds. Performance is actually better with 1xRTT right now, so I'm using my satellite connection until Sprint fixes the problem. I e-mailed them the problem tonight, and hopefully it will be fixed soon. I'd also like to note that tonight is the first time their coverage map shows me as having mobile broadband coverage even though the tower has been there a while. Perhaps they're working on things. I'll update again when service returns to normal, or when I realize it won't, whichever comes first.
Update - 3/29/2007
The service seems to be fixed. I was messing around yesterday, and it connected. Detected Rev A signal, dropped to Rev 0 when I'd connect. Later, it just wouldn't connect. Left it trying to reconnect repeatedly when I went to town, and it was connected with Rev A when I got back. They told me on the phone they'd call me back when they were going to work on the tower. I never got a call. Not sure if it magically fixed itself, if they sent a tech out without calling, or if it was somehow my problem even though it worked fine on other towers. Either way, service is restored.
Update - 10/3/2007
After reading my last update, figured I should mention that Sprint did in fact call me and see if my problems were fixed. The representative wouldn't admit it was a fault with the tower, but made it pretty clear that it was. I'm still very satisfied with the service, seeing speeds of around 600/500 on average. I've also added a 10% discount to my Sprint bill, reducing the monthly cost. Overall, I still love it for its reliability and mobility, but have no intention of telling my closer neighbors with WildBlue and HughesNet. Oddly enough, there's a house with WildBlue in downtown Hanover where cable is clearly an option.
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