I received the new 3G Airave from Sprint today. I must say, there is not much of a need for me to turn on Wi-Fi on my phone with this thing running. The below speed tests are from the Airave over my Comcast connection. This is certainly a nice change over the original model that only offered 1x data where my devices would still reach out to local towers and eat up battery. I look forward to seeing what kind of battery savings that I realize with a strong data signal in our home. The real kicker would be having broadband at the cabin and putting this thing to use when needed.
I am very curious to see what Sprint does with the VOIP capabilities that this device offers. It would be nice to consolidate my phones to a single bill but it might be difficult for them to beat our the feature set and pricing that I currently have with another VOIP carrier. This functionality will offer Sprint another revenue stream and likely be a great way to lure people from traditional phone lines.
So far, the new Airave is showing our location correctly on Google Latitude unlike the previous model that showed me a couple of cities away.
I still have 4G in my neighborhood in case Comcast goes down… 🙂
The new Airvana model all ready to go.
