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Sprint Airave Lets You Make Calls Over The Internet – July 15th

by Ronen Halevy on Jul 2nd, 2008 at 8:02 am EST
5 Comments »
 

Wayne @ GearDiary caught wind that the Sprint Airave will be released July 15th. I actually saw a demo of this at the Sprint corporate offices a few months back and it was beautiful. The Airave is essentially a mini cellphone tower that routes all of your calls over the internet. Kind of like UMA but without the WiFi part.

Airave2This would save you money on calls and give you reception in locations where you might not have. While I was at Sprints corporate offices I asked them if I could use the Airave while traveling. I was sad to learn that it has a built in GPS chip that only lets it work where Sprint has coverage!!! SUCKS. You also need to keep the device near a window so it can get a GPS fix.

You will need to pay for an extra service to use the Airave. According to Wayne this should be $15 for an individual or $30 for a family. You do get unlimited calling over the internet with the plan so its not a terrible deal.

Pretty interesting stuff. I think they need to lower the price and lose the GPS restriction. Check it out on Sprints site at this link.

Sprint via SprintUsers via GearDiary via BoyGenius via Speedy Gonzalez via Juan Valdez …..

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 and is filed under News.
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5 Comments to “Sprint Airave Lets You Make Calls Over The Internet – July 15th”

  1. Posted by: rndy
    July 2, 2008 at 12:59 pm EST

    OR you can use tmo’s service for $10 bucks a month and get unlimited UMA calling, without the gps/only being able to use it in a tmo coverage area clause. And its $10 for an individual or your whole family plan… Sprint’s version sounds like an over priced rip off of tmos talk forever mobile.

  2. Posted by: DavidB
    July 2, 2008 at 3:01 pm EST

    This is a femtocell, a similar concept to UMA but not really.

    Sprint has been trialing these in a couple places USA for several months now. I think it’s a really cool concept, install your own mini cell phone site, but an issue that come to MY mind is would there be any personal liability if someone did something illegal on their device while connected via your femtocell (which is connected to the world via your high speed internet service)??? And with companies like Cox and Comcast looking to throttle our cable modem services, someone connecting to your femtocell could use up a bunch of cable modem bandwidth that not only do you have to pay Sprint for the femto but you have to pay your ISP for the data backhaul, and I can’t see that the cable companies would be all too excited about bunches of cellular femtocells using their backbones for phone call carriage (when they are trying to market that themselves!).

  3. Posted by: Ronen Halevy
    July 2, 2008 at 11:00 pm EST

    Yeah it is way too expensive! I just thought it would be cool to be able to setup your own celltower site… :)

  4. Posted by: Gary
    July 3, 2008 at 12:46 am EST

    But can you get it without paying the monthly fee? I need it because I get crap coverage in my apartment, but since I have the SE plan I don’t need unlimited calling.

    Also I don’t thing the cable companies have much to worry about. Voice calls take up very little bandwidth.