cranston

Whilst at Best Buy yesterday the salesguy was trying to push the Clear 4G broadband service.

Has anyone used this service? If so how would you rate it?

Steerpike

Is this Sprint? If so, last gasp of a dying company ... though they'll be picked up by Verizon, very likely.

chartreuse

Oddly enough, there's a thread about this on Slashdot right now...

Steerpike

This extract from the article is useful: "Sprint and Verizon are taking different routes in 4G. Sprint owns a majority of Clearwire Corp., which is building a network using WiMax technology. Once seen as very promising, WiMax looks set to be a niche technology, and WiMax devices like the Sprint EVO phone won't be able to use networks built using the dominant 4G standard, called LTE, for Long Term Evolution. Verizon and MetroPCS plan to use LTE, as does AT&T, starting next year. T-Mobile says it will probably use LTE eventually. Even Sprint hasn't ruled out using LTE eventually, because the technology has huge momentum."

I'm not sure why Sprint are doing this - presumably, they are in a mad rush to be the first to market in a desparate attempt to recover some market share, and the WiMax is the only viable 'immediate' solution. Sprint's stock has tanked relative to Verizon and ATT, and their recent activities don't bode well (buying Nextel, embracing Palm, and now this).

As others have said, I wish all the carriers would focus on better voice reliability, but then I'm just an old fuddy duddy!