Full disclosure:  I received the aircard for free and one month of service for free.  At the end of my evaluation period, I have to give the aircard back unless I want to continue service.

AT&T, Clear, Sprint, T-Mobile*, and Verizon Wireless are all launching 4G networks.  Sprint resells Clear, and they’re the first out of the gate.  They are currently the only publicly-available 4G network in the US.  Verizon will be next in line, with a build scheduled to begin within the next 6-8 weeks.  AT&T will start sometime in 2011.  T-Mobile is an interesting exception, because their 3G network — according to them — is faster than the 4G networks planned by the other big three.

With my Asus eee PC 1201n in tow, I began testing the Clear adapter.

Right off the bat I ran into a hiccup.  The drivers included with the adapter don’t work with Windows 7 (or, for that matter, OS X).  I had to come home, download updated drivers from their website, and install them separately.  Windows 7 isn’t exactly new — the RTM has been available for almost a year now, giving developers plenty of time to work things out.

Once I got the drivers installed, however, the process of using the aircard was painless.  In my real-world testing at various locations in and around Harrisburg, I’ve measured an average speed of 3.5 / 1.3.  The slowest location was St. Thomas Roasters (0.6/ 0.3), and the fastest was Midtown Scholar (5.6 / 1.5).  Hands down, Clear is the fastest cellular Internet connection I’ve ever used!  But there’s a catch.

Since Clear is building their own 4G network from the ground up, coverage is extremely limited.  In my opinion, calling it threadbare would be extremely generous.  It didn’t work in my office, my garage, or my basement — all places with strong Verizon Wireless coverage.  To be fair, AT&T doesn’t work in my basement or garage either, and they only barely work in my office.  But having become accustomed to having 3G damn near everywhere, I was especially mindful of Clear’s coverage holes.

To counter this, Clear’s devices fall back to 3G (using Sprint’s EVDO Rev A network) when no 4G signal is available.  During my testing, this failed miserably.  It took several minutes to try to coax the device into 3G mode, and even then coverage was variable.

I tested the device’s automatic 3G / 4G switching by driving to work with my netbook on the floor streaming an Internet radio station.  This is a very lightweight connectivity test, as it only requires a 128k connection and will buffer through any minor interruptions.  Since I couldn’t get coverage in my parking garage, I started the test in front of my building.  I fired up the netbook, plugged in the USB aircard, and waited for signal.

And waited.

And waited.

After about three minutes, I decided I was in a dead spot, so I pulled up to Second & State.  No signal.  A few minutes later, I pulled up to Second & Forster.  Finally able to pull in a 4G signal, I launched the player and drove off to work.  I made it to Cameron St & I-81 before losing signal.  It bounced back on for a few seconds around the old Earthlink building, but that was it.  It’s not that the stream got interrupted when it switched from 4G to 3G — it’s that it never switched.  When I got to work and looked down, my signal indicator was at zero.

I know for a fact, from first-hand experience, that Sprint provides 3G coverage in and around my building.  But my Clear 4G USB aircard simply would not or could not pick it up, no matter how much I begged or pleaded.

I’m sure Clear is constantly expanding their network, and I’ll continue to test this for the full 30 days.  And while the service has its shortcomings, Clear is doing something we’ve all been screaming for for decades — bringing more competition to the wireless industry.  Competition drives down rates, improves service, and gives consumers more choice.  My early impression is that Clear’s product is solid, and if they can get their coverage up to par, they’ll do well.

Another review in two weeks …

* – T-Mobile is currently deploying HSPA+, which has a theoretical maximum speed of around 21 mb/s.  This puts them in the unusual position of having a 3G network that is, for the moment, faster than any 4G network (at least for the next few years).  Nonetheless, T-Mobile has stated that they plan on upgrading to LTE in the future.

If you’ve never tried it, wireless Internet is 27 different kinds of awesome.  Imagine having WiFi readily available everywhere you go (unless you have AT&T).  Doesn’t matter if you’re on the train to New York, sitting in your office on the west shore, or floating down the Susquehanna on a pontoon boat — you can have unfettered, unrestricted, high-speed access to everything, everywhere, all the time.

And late last month, it got even faster.

For the last few years, we’ve had a few flavors of 3G service in the area.  AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless all offer 3G service in the area.  While T-Mobile’s UMTS is technically the fastest, their coverage is the most … “lean”.  And although Verizon’s speed is the slowest (bear in mind that “slow” is relative, as you’re still about 1/3rd the speed of a typical cable modem), their 3G service is pretty much everywhere.  Sprint is a close second, and AT&T offers faster speeds but almost no coverage.

Before I talk about Clear’s service and coverage, let me give you a quick wireless primer.  The days of “voice-only” customers are rapidly dwindling, as anyone with a Droid / Blackbery / iPhone / WinMo device will tell you.  And the more you know about the underlying technology, the better-armed you are as a consumer — and the more likely you are to see through marketing hype.

First, I’m keeping this very simple.  The lines between 2G, 2.5G, and 3G tend to get a little blurry depending on who you talk to or who won the most recent edit war on Wikipedia.  The descriptions that follow are pretty straightforward as they apply to most non-technically-inclined people.

Cellular service as we know it in the US started with analog service in the early 1980s. This is regarded as first-generation service (though to be fair, it was by no means the first commercial cellular deployment; you do not want to know what came before this).  Technically known as AMPS — Advanced Mobile Phone System — analog service was plagued with static, crosstalk, bulky phones, and rampant fraud.  While wireless data did exist, it was generally over the CDPD network at a whopping 19.2k.  It was largely limited to public safety and commercial applications.

In the late 90s, wireless companies began rolling out second-generation (2G) wireless networks.  New networks — mainly using GSM (AT&T and T-Mobile) and CDMA (Sprint and Verizon Wireless) — were built to accommodate the new features and handle heavier call volumes.   Data in the 2G era used platforms like GPRS, EDGE, and 1xRTT and delivered peak speeds of 50k – 200k.  And beginning in the early 2000s, 3G data platforms like EVDO and UMTS have largely supplanted the 2G data networks (except on AT&T, which still relies heavily on EDGE for the bulk of its national data coverage).

So here we are.  Long story short?  Data has gone from 9600-at-best during the circuit-switched days to true over-the-air broadband at speeds of around 1.5 – 4mb/s today.  And the way we use our devices has changed dramatically, too.  We used to turn the phone on, make a call, and turn it off.  Today, voice is an afterthought for us; our devices are always on, always connected, and give us a perpetual window to friends and family.

But as great as 3G is, its end is already near.  Verizon Wireless and AT&T are building out their own independent 4G networks using LTE.  Sprint, by way of Clearwire, is building its 4G network using WiMax.  Verizon will begin building their network in a few more weeks, while AT&T will begin in 2011 — but Clear is up and running right now.  I have to point out that neither of these platforms is “true” 4G.  The differences are, frankly, pedantic, and are beyond the scope of this blog.

About two weeks ago I was given an Edge 4G USB aircard to test out for 30 days.  I’ve been tinkering with it, and it’s not bad.  I’ll go into more detail in a few days.  Today I wanted to get this post up to give you a background, and so I can clear this off my “Drafts” page.

Because I have a budget to start blogging about.

Again.

This all started a few weeks ago when I got my first shady email from them trolling for my email address .  I actually get a steady stream of emails like this; since my contact form doesn’t disclose my actual email addresses, spammers occasionally send “feeler” emails (“Your domain is about to expire”, “Your hosting has been disabled”, “SEO LOL”, etc).  The idea is that I’ll reply and they’ll have another email address to annoy and sell.  Multiply this by the hundreds of thousands of sites their scripts hit, and this tiny success rate turns into a few pennies’ worth of profit for zero effort.  Between the captcha and Bad Behavior, most of them get blocked.  But every now and then, a few will slip through.

And I assumed this was one of them.  After all, what kind of event invitation demands that I email them back in order to get more information?  And while this all may sound a little paranoid, when I clicked through to the domain they provided, it was a vague, cookie-cutter-website for a “new media marketing consulting group”.

No, really.  They actually say that.

Their website says they’re from Seattle — an unlikely candidate for wanting to organize a Tweetup in Harrisburg.  And if this all sounds a little paranoid, their Twitter feed is a steady stream of cut-and-paste replies begging people to click on a bit.ly link.

Yep.  Totally legit.

Right about now, most marketers — especially those that include terms like “affiliate” or “consultant” in their titles — would smugly cross their arms and say “So?  The whole point is to get people talking about the event.”  The problem, of course, is that nobody was talking about the Clear 4G Harrisburg launch.  After searching Twitter a few hours before the event, it became apparent that the headcount would be extremely low.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who was put off.

At the end of the day, barely a dozen people (and that’s being generous) actually showed up for the event.  It’s hard to get an exact count — especially after their employees started asking questions during the Q&A session — but there were far, far fewer people than should have been there.  Hell, we get twice that many to the Harrisburg Tweetups, and we don’t even have free booze!

The thing about marketing is that you as a client are judged by the image of the firm you retain.  If your marketing company starts annoying everyone they come across, you’re going to look bad.  You and your image are, to most consumers, inseparable.  Simply blaming bad exposure on the marketing firm doesn’t work; after all, you hired them, and you (should have) approved their tactics.  So right off the bat, Clear left me with a second-rate, fly-by-night impression.

This is unfortunate, because competition is always a good thing.  And in the wireless industry, we need as much competition as we can possibly get.  I hope Clear does well, but if they keep marketing themselves like this, I have my doubts.

I’ll post my experiences with the card in the coming days.

About once a quarter, a rumor of “somebody” buying either T-Mobile or Sprint makes its way around the intarwebs.  And usually, it hasn’t come true.  But this one actually has some bite.  If you’re not interested in the logic behind this, the TL/DL is that Sprint and T-Mobile desperately need each other, and Sprint’s shareholders are murderously pissed at Sprint’s management over sustained gross incompetence.  Read on for the notion.

The current wireless landscape has AT&T on top with 71.4 million subscribers and $47.2 billion (forecast) in annual revenue, Verizon Wireless with 67.2m / $43.9b, Sprint with 54m / $34.9b (forecast), and T-Mobile with 28.7m / $17.5b (forecast).  That’s a pretty big discrepancy in both revenue and subscriber count between the top two carriers and the bottom two.  While the other carriers were all posting near-million-subscriber net gains for the fourth quarter 2007, Sprint actually managed to post a net subscriber loss.  And that’s pretty much been the way things have gone since 2000 or so.

Rumors of a Sprint buyout are nothing new.  Every quarter, the trades light up with rampant speculation over someone hinting at a Sprint buy.  What’s interesting this time around is that Sprint is getting desperate.  Really desperate.  They have enough capital and bandwidth on hand to weather their current storm for a while longer, so they’re in no immediate danger of falling apart.  But somewhere between subscriber loss, poor revenues, monthly executive-shuffling, and bi-weekly advertising changeups, Sprint’s future isn’t very good.

T-Mobile is an interesting choice.  They compliment Sprint and Sprint compliments them.  For example, Sprint has hands-down the worst customer service in the industry (which is the main reason the subscriber adds are so limp); for the last four years, T-Mobile has been recognized as having the highest customer satisfaction in the industry.  Sprint has an overabundance of bandwidth; T-Mobile has enough bandwidth for today, but not enough for tomorrow’s data services.  T-Mobile has no 3G data to speak of; Sprint has the biggest 3G network in the nation.  T-Mobile is starving for customers; Sprint has boatloads of customers who are desperate for change.

Perhaps most beneficial to both is that if Sprint and T-Mobile joined forces, they would be the largest wireless carrier in the nation with over 91 million subscribers.  Not only is this a huge selling point, but it would be a major kick in the nethers to both AT&T and VZW.  Neither regards T-Mobile as a serious competitor.  Verizon Wireless, the one-time industry leader which since 2004 has been telling its employees that it will regain the #1 position “any day now”, would be relegated to third place in a race of three.

That alone has me hoping for a buyout.