Bye Bye Sprint PCS Aircard, Hello Verizon EVDO

My Spring PCS Aircard agreement ended on 2/23 and I wanted to upgrade from its 50-120 kbps to EVDO's 400-2000 kbps. I was pretty unhappy with Sprint because they'll give new customers a free EVDO card but for me, a customer for seven years who has spent tens of thousands of dollars with them, I get the luxury of paying $250 for the same card.

So I've called a couple times and gotten the gee-that's-too-bad treatment and I called today with the intent of canceling. After telling my story to someone at Business Services ("Let me transfer you to cancellations."), when the cancellation person asks why I'm canceling, I tell her. She asks if she can check and see if she can get me a discount. I said "sure." A couple minutes later she came back with "good news", they would give me the card for $100. I told her I wanted it for free, like a new customer gets. Again she goes away for a couple of minutes and then comes back and tells me it's a go, I can get it for free, but that I might want to just cancel anyway and restart a new account because I get a longer warranty or something. OK, cool, cancel me. I thanked her for being the only person who actually tried to keep me as a customer.

Since I was then free, I started checking out the alternatives and discovered that Verizon appears to have a substantially larger EVDO footprint than Sprint at this point, plus Mac support is solid (http://www.evdoinfo.com/), and in particular the Kyocera KPC650 looks like the best choice for Mac people. I checked out buying from https://booster-antenna.com/verizon/ and gave them a buzz to ask them a couple questions. The person I talked to was clued and the answers were what I wanted/needed to hear, so I decided to go with Verizon and, in particular, the Kyocera card, and to buy it directly from them, along with their booster antenna. I placed the order at 4 PM CST and got an immediate confirmation, and then a next-day shipment confirmation a little before 8.

I'm pretty excited about this, and I'll be using it in Atlanta this weekend. I travel a fair bit and I use my computer a lot, so there have been lots of times when the Aircard was super valuable. With EVDO it'll be all that with real broadband speeds most of the time and, in the worst case, fallback to the slower speed when outside their EVDO coverage areas.