[neodorian]

I used WiMax in Baltimore for the past few months. It's just like having an EVDO card for your laptop except that the network is faster and it uses a different protocol. The service is somewhat pricey as they charge by device. I discontinued the service because it's not worth $45/month to me to be able to browse the web at 5mpbs when I can pay $15/month to connect using my PPC at 3mpbs. Also there is not much coverage yet.

It's closer to the data plan for your cell or lappy than any kind of femtocell or Wifi. In fact, the stupid software they make you use to connect to the Wimax network will not allow you to have your wifi radio on at the same time and when you turn on wifi with the Wimax connection program running, it screws up the program and I had to manually end the process for the intel wimax software before it would work again.

The advent of evdo/wimax hybrid cards may help push adoption because moving seamlessly from wimax to evdo in areas not yet covered by wimax would be nice. They just need to lower the prices and work on integration with wifi. I really hope they work out the kinks because Sprint really needs this to work out. They need to polish the service, price competitively, and advertise well. Otherwise, they will probably not last much longer.