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Review by cjkaufman 
Posted: 9.1 years ago
member for 9.1 years, 5 visits, last login: 7.6 years ago
 Queen Creek,Maricopa,AZ
 $39 per month (12 month contract)
 "No telco distance restrictions or cable availability issues."
 "Sometimes not as fast as landline connections"
 "If you can't get anything else, and it's available in your area, it's a darn good deal."
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I've read the other reviews that have had negative comments about Sprint Broadband due to performance, but I think if your ordering the service based solely on performance expectations you're ordering it for the wrong reason. You can't expect better performance of a wireless anything than some sort of landline, be it a wireless phone, internet, whatever. Where this ISP really works great is when you have no other alternative.
The service and other options I had were real bad. My dialup was 26400 and anytime I would attempt to download anything other than mail, I would drop carrier. (I talked to Qwest about the problem, but if you've ever had to deal with a telco about a dialup problem you know where that got me. I even tried Qwest as my ISP, had the same problem with dropping carrier, and the telco side refered me back to the ISP side for problem resolution. Go figure.) I'm also 19000+ feet from the CO so DSL is out of the question, and cable companies haven't even begun to think about doing site surveys within 5 miles of where I live. (It's all satellite/Dish TV where I am.) I could order ISDN, have it backhauled from another CO since mine doesn't offer it, and pay $65/mo for the service and $40/mo for ISP. $105 per month for Internet service? No way, not for that bandwidth.
I live in the SE corner of Maricopa county in Arizona (Power and Riggs, phone service from Qworst off the Higley CO for those who know,)and Sprint BB was a Godsend for me. My line of site to South Mountain is good and only needed a 3ft mast off my roof, and installation went fairly well.
I typically get about 200k and the rest of the service has been pretty decent. Considering what I had before, this has worked out great for me.
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Review by bigmontana
Posted: 9.1 years ago
member for 9.1 years, 3 visits, last login: 6.1 years ago
Redford,Wayne,MI
$39 per month (24 month contract)
 about 5 days
 Sprint
CLEC party: Sprint
"Time to install from order date - 5 days. Free installation, $99 for equipment."
"6 hours to install, 30 foot mast on my roof, 1 experienced installer with a rookie"
"I went from Earthlink dialup to Covad DSL to Sprint wireless, nothing beats this."
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Great service so far, knowledgeable employees, from the sales staff to the installers. They did a better job of installation then Covad did with my DSL, they were better prepared and cleaned up aftrward, unlike Covad. Only limitation is that you have to be in line of site of the radio tower, so if there are any tall trees or high buildings you can forget about getting the servicce; tho next year Sprint will be using cell towers as relay points so they can widen their service. I highly recommend Sprints wireless over DSL and cable anyday, as the price, service, knowledgeable staff, and speed is an unbeatable combination. We downloaded a 20 meg file in 42 seconds, the best I was able to achieve with my DSL service was 16k a second. So, if Sprint wireless is available in your area, get it now, you won't be disappointed.
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Review by aceone11
Posted: 9.1 years ago
member for 9.1 years, 31 visits, last login: 2.4 years ago
Detroit,Wayne,MI
$39 per month (2 month contract)
about 4 days
Sprint
CLEC party: Sprint
"Since i was one of the first ones to order, i got it in 4 days"
"Install took 5.5-6.0 hours......I had to have a 20 ft pole on my roof"
"Going from a dial up to this connection....it RULES!!!!!!"
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Very good service. Service just became available in the detroit area, it uses a wireless signal to communicate with the tower. The only downfall about the service is you have to have line of sight with the tower. I had great readings from the tower i am communicating with. Installation was rather long, the antenna took about 4 hours, the downfall was i had a 20ft pole installed on my roof, for a better signal. But ill tell ya the service is very fast. Ive had speed tests at 900kb. Not bad for 39.95 a month. Going from using AOL to this is immaculate. I Highly recommend it. The Tech was friendly, and knowledgable. We downloaded a 20mb file in 43 seconds. Pretty impressive
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Review by johnzonie
Posted: 9.2 years ago
(review was emailed from domain earthlink.net)
Tucson,Pima,AZ
$40 per month (24 month contract)
"Incredible speed for the money"
"Installers not terribly PC literate"
"Recommended in Tucson, AZ YMMV"
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Sprint Broadband, www.sprintbroadband.com, is the name of a wireless
Internet provider, currently serving Phoenix and Tucson. Using frequencies
in the 2.4-2.7 GHz range, it is a point-multipoint system that promises 1
Mbps download and 256Kbps upload speeds. The upload speed is limited by the
transmitter power from the home and the distance to the tower. The maximum
distance is 35 miles line-of-site.
The service consists of installing an outside antenna that is square, 13.5"
inches on a side, and running a CATV-type coax to the "modem-router", which
is located near the PC. The modem connects to the PC via Ethernet.
Costs are $40 per month, with installation fee currently waived. The
equipment charge is variable at $199 for a one-year commitment and $99 for a
two-year one. They provide the antenna, modem and Ethernet card. They
insist you have a fre IRQ and are not all that skilled about PCI interrupt
sharing so you may have to install the card yourself or else they may walk
away without installing. I installed my card and my neighbor's.
Sprint uses Earthlink for their mail and news provider. You will get 5
e-mail addresses like xxxxx.earthlink.net.
Except for the network card issue, installation proceeded smoothly. As this
is an always-on modem-router, there is no login. All that is needed to get
started is a release-renew cycle via winipcfg.exe for the NIC that connects
to the modem. That's it! No PPPoE or anything complicated. They will
offer to install Earthlink software. I recommend against it if you are at
all comfortable with your mail client and browser. The Earthlink software
replaces your applications with "dumbed-down" versions of each.
Performance for me (Tucson) has been nothing short of astounding! In my
region of Tucson (Oro Valley) not only is there no high-speed internet
available, the best we can do on dial-up is 28.8Kbps. This is due to the
wiring technology that Qwest has installed. There is no cable modem
provider - that is at least 18 months away. So Sprint Broadband is the only
game in town for me. Fortunately, performance has been exceptional.
Download speeds routinely hit 4 Mbps! Uploads measure 200Kbps or so on the
dslreports site. I see higher uploads when Napster downloads are being
taken from me, so there may be some measurement anomaly. In any case, the
physical connection has been exceptional. Since I hooked up on July 1, here
were two 1 hour outages around 3 AM local time over weekends and that has
been it! There have been none in August. I rate the service A+.
Performance in other areas, especially in Phoenix/Scottsdale, seems to be a
bit problematic, based on some comments in the Community forum. I
understand some improvements are "planned" but can't comment on if or when
they will be done or help. My experience here in Tucson has been great!
Earthlink is a little different service. Mail has had some more
interruptions, although nothing awful. Based on total availability, I rate
it B+. The news server seems to be slow, sometimes overloaded, and
occasionally inaccessible, especially during peak times. It is rated C, and
that is generous. Again, it is on the low side of liveable.
Overall, I have done a lot of experimentation with the service in an attempt
to get a working Video Phone. As a result, I can report that both a Linksys
BEFSR141 and a Netgear RT-314 work fine with the service. (Of course
neither works with video conferencing as they claim, but that is another
story.) The nature of the service is to challenge the WAN-LAN throughput of
the routers. Given my average download speed of 4.4 MBps or so, the routers
reduced that throughput considerably. Linksys hit around 2.4 to 2.6 Mbps
and Netgear RT314 showed 2.8 to 3.0 Mbps. I am currently using Sybergen
SyGate 4.0 which allows full speed and seems to work well.
Hope this helps in your evaluation and decision process.
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Review by rjensen2689
Posted: 9.2 years ago
member for 9.3 years, 519 visits, last login: 15 days ago
Phoenix,Maricopa,AZ
$39 per month (24 month contract)
about 30 days
Sprint
CLEC party: Sprint
"Do not recommend. Have no good point."
"They do not care. They are a large corperation that does not care about the customers."
"The is a quick as twice the speed of a 56k modem"
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I have had Sprint Broadband as of 06/03/2000. The speed is to be 3Mbs/265Kps. The speed that I am receiving is 20Kps/.5Kps. I have had seven technician that state they can not do anything. The techs blame sprint and sprint blames my connection. I was to have three supervisor. I have had none. I called Sprint on 08/22/2000. They stated that a supervisor was at my place on 08/19/2000. There was no supervisor. This has happened numberiously. The last tech that was here stated that he would schedule an engineer. Also, to call sprint in 30 minutes for a date and time the engineer would arive. I called one hour later @ 1:30 pm. No one knew anything. They stated they would receive a call from the tech about this. They would call back right after talking to tech. I called them at 4:30. No person knew about this problem. I spoke to a lead in tech support about this problem. He called me back at 11:30 PM of the same date. He stated that he requisted an engineer. He could not schedule the engineer because of the low amount of engineers. They will call me and make a shedule. He stated, if they do not call you in one week, call him. He made this statment on 08/15/2000. I have not heard from them as of 08/25/2000. This was expected. I have received very poor service from Sprint Broadband. I ordered and signed a two year contract, thus, if I was to cancel it would cost $254. DO NOT ORDER SPRINT BROADBAND. IF I AM RECEIVING ABUSIVE SERVICE, SO ARE OTHERS AND OTHERS WILL.
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Review by cbruce5
UPDATED: 9.4 years ago
member for 9.4 years, 82 visits, last login: 8.5 years ago
Mesa,Maricopa,AZ
$90 per month (12 month contract)
"Only game in town for the true desert rat that can't get some other broadband service"
"very inconsistent....highly unreliable..so bad I am unable to send attachments with e-mail at times"
"BUYER BEWARE!"
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I have been a customer of the 2-way wireless cable modem service since April
of 1999. Although the system is great when it works; the consistency and
reliablity of the connection is poor at best. Most often there are
latencies in the 300-400ms range as well as 10%+ packet loss. It seems that
this service has been sold way beyond it's capacity and degredation is
evident in peak periods. Sprint's only comment is 'the speed of the
connection isn't guaranteed'. I must say the the help desk personnel as
well as the field techs do their best to resolve these probelms, but rarely
have the information or ability to correct them. I now wonder if these are
inherent problems with this technology. I caution those who have other high
speed options available to them to talk with other Sprint/Speedchoice users
before purchasing. E-mail is effected by the significant packet loss. At times it takes me 5 or 6 trys to send small attachments. On June 26th I asked to have a supervisor review my set-up and problems...they scheduled it for July 17th, they must be having big problems for it to take 3 weeks to respond! BUYER BEWARE!
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Sprint Broadband Direct
