Other 3G Routers

jackal · EVDO Newbie Joined: 30 Mar 2006 Posts: 6

I've ordered a KR1 from booster-antenna.com (it's on backorder now), but I've read a couple of blog posts about a "flood" of new wireless EVDO/UTMS/HSDPA routers coming on the market, including the much-touted Linksys WRT54G3G.

Does anyone know about these or how they compare to the KR1 and/or how soon they'll be available? (And EVDOinfo guys: will booster-antenna.com sell it when it comes out?) Should I hold off for the market to stabilize and prices to come down? (I'd really like one now, though, so I can put it and my booster antenna in my office window and then use my laptop in the rest of the house without ping-ponging between EV-DO and RTT...) Or is the KR1 really a good, useful, top-of-the-line device?

On that note, a couple questions about the KR1:

1. Will it work with my ACS (Alaska Communications Systems) card? I've got a Sierra Wireless 580 that's already activated, so that's not an issue. Is the KR1 only compatible with Sprint and Verizon, or is that just a marketing saying? (ACS uses the same dialing code--#777--as Verizon--it works fine with the PC 580 "hack" on Mac OS X)

2. With the KR1 (or any other routers), can you access any sort of signal strength indicator and an indicator that shows whether it's connected via EV-DO or RTT? Since I'm in a border area, I need to know if the connection's fallen back to RTT so I can either reconnect or pause all my networking activity until it idles and reconnects to EV-DO. Hopefully, if it sits in my window, I won't need to worry about it ping-ponging, but I need to be sure.

tz1 · Posted: Tue Apr 11, 2006 7:05 am Post subject:

I would note a few things:

1. They aren't out yet so I don't know how the shipping product will work.

2. EVDO is tricky - there are still subtle firmware problems in the KR1 that are still being worked on, and each card works slightly differently, so when the new ones come out you will be doing their beta testing.

3. The KR1 has a good feature set. It will be interesting to see if the ones coming out do as much.

visortgw · Posted: Tue Apr 11, 2006 8:46 am Post subject:

Also, Kyocera announced the KR1 about the same time last year, and it was never available until 1 February of this year. Don't put too much faith in the promise of a release date for the Linksys router.