Sprint Airave (Rocks!)

In my area there is decent service from AT&T, Sprint & Verizon...but none of them work very well in my neighborhood. I had been intrigued by T-Mobile's Wifi offering, but there service in my area is so bad...that I wouldn't be able to use my phone around town.

I have been hoping and praying that Sprint would release the Airave for the past year. It is a femtocell device from Samsung that acts as a mini cell tower and routes your calls through your broadband connection. It allows any Sprint phone to work using the device and only costs $5/month extra on each phone that uses it (much cheaper than a landline) Currently, it is only available from Sprint stores (no online purchases, whaaat?). None of the stores within 50 miles of me had them in stock, so I purchased mine from eBay.

It picked it up from the Post Office yesterday and began setting it up as soon I got home. I took it out of the box, plugged a cat5 cable from the Airave to my Linksys router, plugged in the power and plugged in the external GPS antenna. Called Airave tech support to activate the device. They picked up in about 10 seconds and were very friendly. They took my MAC address and activated the device telling me it often takes over an hour for the device to come online. They also warned that is sometimes has problems with VoIP phones behind the same router...I was a bit worried because I use a SIP phone (CallWithUs) for my landline. I turned on the device and after no more than 5 minutes, all the lights (power, system, gps & wan) on the device had gone blue. I looked down at my phone...where I normally had 1 bar (on a good day) I had full service. Placed a test call to my wife in the next room and we could hear each other perfectly. Plugged my SIP phone back and made a test call to the wife's cell phone, great quality and no conflicts.

I will post again soon with more impressions, but so far so good! Nice job Sprint!
(I apologize if I sound like a Sprint fanboy, but I'm so happy I can finally use my cell phone in my house)