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Jun
06

Sprint Overdrive – Houston coverage/review

By now, most of you know (or have heard of) the Sprint Overdrive.  A small shiny black box about the size of a deck of cards is all you need to get up to 5 devices online via wifi backhauled to Sprint’s Wimax 4G network.  So how good is the coverage in Houston?

Short answer:  Pretty damn good.

I was pleasantly surprised that the 4G coverage in Houston covered the majority of the areas that I traveled to throughout my working week.  Please see the approximate locations and speeds via speedtest.net below:

Downtown Houston – window, 4th floor, Travis @ Elgin – 4G 1.06meg down / 0.98 up

North Houston – Data Center ??? 2nd floor, 45/Rankin – 4G 3.12 down / 0.88 up

Galleria area – (W Alabama/Weslayan) – 2nd floor, by window – 4g 4.19 down / 0.30 up

North Houston – Training room 1st floor, 45/Rankin – 4G 4.35 down / 0.83 up

North Houston – Cubicles 1st floor 45/Rankin – 4G 5.68 down / 0.63 up

North Houston – 45/8 bad reception, still 4G, 1.1 down / 0.04 up? possibly mistake, all nodes showed this upload speed

West Houston – I-10/6 – 2nd floor near windows – 4G – 4.33 down / 0.71 up

Those are some pretty healthy speeds I’d say!  Now, please note there was an unexplainable dead spot near Memorial and 610W that just absolutely killed 4G and 3G, but besides that, the Overdrive was extremely useful and literally saved my ass in some instances!  It was sweet to be able to plop down a small unit to get open internet access (as opposed to some corporate guest access that was invariably filtered/webesensed, etc.).   The only “glitch” I had was I had to do a “remove battery” to fix a lockup after changing the 4G/3G preferences from within the Overdrive’s config pages.  Barring that, it was a great tool to get access wherever I happened to be.
So if it was that good, why am I returning it within Sprint’s 30 day window?  Simply because the HTC Evo 4G is here, and it will do everything the Overdrive does, plus act as a phone, browser, etc, all on Sprint’s 4G network.  There’s a review coming!

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