The Sprint Airave is ready to launch July 15. If you’re not sure what the Airave is, think of it as a mini cell tower in your house. It routes all your cell, data, and text messages over the Internet to give you better coverage. This seems like the perfect answer for people that have Sprint but live in “dead zones”. This service will cost $30 for families and $15 for individuals.
Here is the catch, the Airave has a GPS system inside so you can only use it where Sprint normally has coverage. Also the Airave dose not save you minuets like T-Mobile’s Hotspot@home does. So if you don’t need better coverage, this thing its pretty much worthless.
Is there any such solution for AT&T customers (i.e. suckers) whose cellular reception drops to nil when they are at home?
Why would they cripple it like that?!? That’s ridiculous.
According to their website the Airave does in fact offer additional minutes to your plan, unlimited as long as you are in contact with your airave. I hope this is the case because most of my heavy minute usage is done while at home where I have time to talk.
From the Sprint website:
Unlimited Calling
With the AIRAVE Unlimited Voice Plan you can add to your existing Sprint voice plan for unlimited calling from your home.
http://www.sprintenterprise.com/airave/tellMeMore.html
If you pay the $15 a month you have unlimited mins. I was offered $10 a month. We will see when the next bill comes.
Chris is right according to the website you should have unlimited minutes as long as you are using the Airave. As long as you have one of their cheaper minute plans this could be an awesome deal.
http://www.sprintenterprise.com/airave/tellMeMore.html
Chris is right according to the website you should have unlimited minutes as long as you are using the Airave.
http://www.sprintenterprise.com/airave/tellMeMore.html
This post is full of fail. As already mentioned, the fee is for unlimited calling that is used between your handset and this device. The GPS’s primary purpose is for the timing signal to sync up with the network (CDMA equipment timing is from GPS as well) and the billing systems. It is speculated that you can use this outside a licensed Sprint area. However, that speculation is not confirmed for launch.
It is not clear from what I read whether Sprint will offer the Airave service everywhere they are licensed to serve (where Sprint has CDMA 1.9Ghz spectrum rights) or whether it is just in areas that they already have an existing service footprint.
Clearly they don’t want to let people take the units into other countries and set up cells (even femto cells) that use spectrum that some other entity has rights to.
I assume another use of the GPS is to help determine adjacent cells and what switching center the calls would switch to as the airave hands off calls that start in the airave cell.
This article is WRONG!!!!! Sprint has not set a date for the launch, the July 15th date is not correct, It dose save you money because it unlimited minutes as long as you are using the Airave unit. Sprint has not set a pricing plan for the unit or the plans yet since it was in a “beta” market. The thing to keep in mind is that you need a dedicated 120kps Upload and download speed to have it work properly. If you are running multiple computers and the unit, you will runn in to problems.
Check out http://www.sprintenterprise.com/airave/tellMeMore.html for more information