http://www.nextel.com/en/services/airave/index.shtml
Guys, that's the coolest thing ever. Sprint's coming out with a CDMA picocell you can put in your house near a window (you need GPS reception for CDMA to work right, unless you have a stratum 1 primary reference source kicking around), slap onto your internet connection, and basically put your cell coverage anywhere you want. This is awesome. It even supports 1xRTT data.
I've been wanting something like this to come out for a while – it only makes sense. This blows away T Mobile's offering that uses 802.11b/g wireless, because this works with ANY sprint CDMA phone. You don't have to get a special phone to make it work.
That's fucking awesome, and I want one even though I have AT&T and no coverage issues where I live.
In theory I'm supposed to be getting one of these, since my house acts like a Faraday Cage to CDMA signals. No idea when, though.
That anonymous comment was me.
Neat! let me know how it works, because I'm curious.
Excerpt from key features:
And from pricing:
So, it costs you $5/month to operate the picocell. Then you pay an extra $20/month for any airtime that any phone uses that connects to it to not count against the phone's owner. Otherwise, they pay for their used airtime like normal, even though you're not talking to their towers.
The thing supports talking to a maximum of three phones at a time.
Did I miss anything?
The thing's cool, don't get me wrong. But with a limitation of three simultaneous connections, You get three people outside your home/office who have a stronger signal coming from your picocell than from the nearest tower, you're out phone service.
I wonder if you'll be able to control access to it somehow.
You can set an ACL on the unit by telephone number.
They have an ACL on the unit you can set up to control who can use it. It's definitely cool if your service is marginal at your house, paying $5 to make it not suck is awesome.
The other part is this is competing with tmo's wifi thingus, which has similar fees, but requires you to buy a handset that supports GSM and WiFi
http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/addons/services/information.aspx?tp=Svc_Tab_UnlimitedHotSpotCalling
I'm thinking the $4.99 is because it obviously costs the carrier more than $99, and it really gives them no financial advantage.
yea, it does. Since it basically is a cell tower (it speaks standard CDMA and 1xRTT), I don't see why there'd be anything special about 911 calls.
well yea, the towers do that too, but it flips on the GPS in the handset if supported too. I bet it does hand AGPS to the handset for a faster fix though.
there's no standard for transmitting positional data over SIP. Even if so, the methods necessary to assign the data to a pANI and map it into a boundary file so you can build the 911 record's ESQK data so you can route to the right PSAP and transmit valid ALI data all but require that you connect to the selective routers identically to a cell carrier's phase 2 setup, which isn't something any CLEC has that I'm aware of. Crazy stuff.