- Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 20 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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5.0 stars
"Excellent! There is NO MONTHLY FEE provides EVDO signal"
Pros: Provides a high speed EVDO signal to my phone
Can handle 3 phones simultaneously
A snap to setup and install
No monthly fee (I think Sprint *used* to charge a monthly fee long ago which was only $5/mo.)Cons: You may need a south, east, or west facing window because the device has a GPS it uses to determine its location.
Summary: I had a signal that was either very weak or would drop in and out in my house, so I ordered an AIRAVE and I now have an EVDO signal in my house all the time. Data and voice work perfectly, now I get emails and calls on my HTC Touch Pro 2 and HTC Touch Pro phones in the house. My other family members can also get calls and data at the same time since the AIRAVE can handle up to three phones/devices.
If you want to you can pay a monthly fee of $15 or $20/mo. and get unlimited calling while connected to your AIRAVE, I didn't need this so I don't have it. There are a *lot* of rumors (including CNET's own review) on the internet claiming there is a monthly fee for this device, but this isn't true. From what I can tell Sprint used to charge a monthly fee of $5/mo. which would be well worth the price but there isn't a monthly fee.
I put the unit high up and close to the center of my house and placed the included GPS antenna on a window sill.
Setup was snap, all I did was plug it in and called the Sprint number in the AIRAVE manual/quickstart. I waited about 30 minutes and it started working. Sprint even called me the next day to make sure everything was working OK, service was good and polite.
I bought my AIRAVE on Ebay but be careful as I've heard rumored that there *may be* older units floating around in yellow packaging not the newer black packaging. I'm not sure what might be wrong with an 'older' unit, perhaps it gives out a 1x signal instead of an EVDO signal.
Verizon sells a similar unit but for $250! These are only about $100
- 2 replies to this review
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i would like to believe that there is no monthly fee, but I just checked the Sprint site for the Airwave device and they state there is a monthly $4.99 fee.
http://www.nextel.com/en/services/airave/index.shtml -
I would partially agree with the review. I bought one from ebay a while back and would agree that initially there is no fee since sprint does not know you have an airave device. Several months later (~8 months), my airave stopped working. Seems like they caught on that my airave was not registered and that I was not paying the monthly fee. I never did get billed for any charges during that time. I called sprint and got connected with an airave specialist and they waived the monthly $5 fee since they thought I would be leaving Sprint. Besides that, the device has worked miracles in my house. I can actually go anywhere and get full signal strength where I used to get 1 bar. Defenitely worth having, knowing that you can make a call if neded.
