Sierra Wireless 250u (Sprint)

Pros: The 4.5 mbps down and the 1.8 up are superior to 3g no doubt. Plus Sprint worked out the streaming capability by building in a sort of buffer to regulate video streams without stopping them..Which to me is worth the double the price they charge.

Cons: It wrecks Verizon Cards if you plug one in with the Sprint Software running. FTP Files get corrupt unless you lower the compression. Software a bit tricky to make run at first.

Summary: I was excited as heck because when they turned on the 4g in West Palm Beach. We were about to do a video streaming event live, so I got the card set it up on my desktop first. Made the mistake- and I shoulda known better- of plugging the card in while I was installing the software. Nightmare to undo. So I get it up and running on all three computers for the streaming the next day. The 4g Connects and I test the speed with 4 bars at 4.8 down and 1.8 up on Military trail right behind the Palm Beach Airport. Plenty of bandwidth to upstream a nice 320 x 240 stream at 1000 kbps. Now the bad part. I decided to make a few last minute changes to my web page and reload it via FTP and BOOM all H$5^ breaks loose. During FTP Sprint Smartview tries to compress the files and wrecks them. Once my index file uploaded down the site went. The ftp wouldn't connect until after about 5 tries so I shoulda suspected then. I ended up using the in house internet at the facility to upload new files and we were back in business. Later I talked with Sprint and again they admitted that the compression had to be turned off in order to FTP or you would have my problem every time.

Another cute little thing Sprint doesn't tell you is that if you plug a Verizon card into a computer with Sprint's Smartview installed, it will immediately wreck the AT settings on the Verizon card. Verizon knows this and walked me through changing the AT commands in the card to fix it, but beware. Its like a virus.

Having negotiated those two land minds, I will say we streamied 3 hours and 20 minutes with barely a hitch in the stream on this card. And that is totally worth the price of the problems..as Sprint has no charegs for bandwidth which works out perfect for me. Plus it solves the problem of having to hunt down internet bandwidth and then try and connect. They are saying in ceratin places its should be as much as 8 mbps down and 5 mbps up, but I I dont think I was anywhere near that last saturday night.

Its now off to the races to See who gets more towers up at 4g between Sprint and Verizon. Sprint got my dime because they were up first, but we will test the Verizon cards at 4g soon. Neither company puts out any time tables on the rollout as they did with 3g so its just a wait and see. For Now Sprint Rules the Speed game. I give em 4.5 as I am very forgiving IT person when it comes to newbie rollouts. The Ad says speed and it delivered for 3 hours without a hitch.