 Review by Fox McCloud 
UPDATED: 40 days ago
member for 2.2 years, 955 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 undisclosed location
 $49 per month (24 month contract)
 "Decent bandwidth (for wireless) mobility."
 "latency, reliability, 5GB cap, poor tech support."
 "Decent alternative to satellite, dial-up, or ISDN."
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(ratings match consensus)
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I had known about EVDO for quite a long time; I first heard about it when I signed up for cellphone service about 2 years ago; about a year later, I started researching it as a dial-up alternative (since satellite was strictly out, as I wanted to play games online). Unfortunately, neither Verizon, nor Sprint had EVDO coverage; worse yet, people were starting to discover the true nature of Verizon's EVDO service.
However, a number of months ago, Sprint showed, on their maps, that my area was lit with EVDO; I was truly overjoyed. Anyway, to cut a long story short, by the time I ordered my EVDO card, EVDO Revision A had also been deployed in my area!
All in all, the connection has been great; I get a fairly consistent 1270k down (I'm maxing out the tower [this particular one has only one T1 line]...the absolute maximum speed for a tower is 1288k...Sprint keeps 256k for themselves), and 200-250k up (with the laptop, I get about 500-600k up...I used the WRT54G3G-ST router, and it has issues of cutting the upload speed). Latency is the semi-bad, yet semi-good part. The good, is that it's vastly better than satellite, and definitely better than dial-up. The downside? It's still a little high; I typically ping Google at 100 ms, and have a ping of 140-200 ms in most Battlefield 2 game servers. Yeah, the latency is high for a FPS, but hey, that hasn't stopped me from getting well over 2000 kills within the past month! (I do, however run into a few servers which kick for having latency of 150+...but not all are like that).
All in all, after taxes and surcharged are added on, I only pay $50.90. Not bad, only 91 cents in taxes+surcharges; I can handle that!
Also, if you're curious as to how I got EVDO for $49.99 a month, I went with Sprint's SERO plan.
Update: I've had to really take a chunk out of the reliability of my connection; of late, it's been up-down-up-down...literally dropping and reconnecting multiple times in 1 minute...not a good thing; not only that, but whenever I've called, they peddle it off onto Linksys, since I use their router...of course, Linksys peddles it off onto Sprint.
The tech support downgrade is because they never have tried to help with the problems; they simply pass the buck....
the downgrade in value for money is due to the new 5GB cap, and the service here is just terrible now; it used to be great (please note, I'm in the same exact location as when I first made this review), but now I can only get 800 kbps down and around 200-250 kbps up...lovely...and that's with the router or laptop.
Overall, I've become highly dissatisfied with the service; there's a high probability that Embarq will be deploying DSL in the area very soon; I'll be more than happy to switch once it becomes available.
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