Yes Chris, I recently (last night) heard about Millenicom and am (was) very excited. I just couldn't pull the trigger on that crazy 2 year Sprint contract. Millenicom has all the pluses of Sprint that I can tell without the minuses - no contracts and only $59/mo. They were providing a leased aircard too along with that - which is amazing.
However I went to their site to sign up,
https://www.millenicom.com/ and they have a big red paragraph stating how they are currently out of the CDU680 cards, but will allow people with their own equipment to still sign up. They provide a number and state that they hope to have the situation resolved by May 1st.
I just called them this morning to get the specifics and it turns out the world is changing. The guy said they will be getting away from the Sprint reseller situation (Sprint is apparently losing 10 billion a month) and instead will have their own network and their own equipment for accessing. It will not only be nationwide but also Mexico and Canada. Their new system will be faster (though still EVDO) with better coverage footprint. The subscribers will own (purchase) their own equipment (aircard) for accessing. They expect the cost of that to be $60 which they will provide. They then plan on returning to the $39 / month rate which they used to apparently have, and subscribers will still own their equipment. All of this is in the works. They have patents approved and are currently waiting on FCC approval (hopefully by May) to begin the rollout. He also mentioned there is something huge called 'The Grid' which is supposed to be '10,000 times' faster with wide coverage targeted for the end of the year.
I asked the guy what I should do. He said that if I signed up now even with my own equipment (which they still allow) that by the first of middle of May I would likely need to kill the old plan, and sign up with the new one with new equipment. He did mention that Sprint offers a 30 day return policy that might act as a buffer while I am waiting for their rollout to the new system.
So, now I have to figure out what I will do in the interim.
(NOTE: For all of you that I linked here from other threads the reason I did so, was because it really sounds like Millenicom has the best, least inexpensive, and flexible chase data solution out there. Many of the other threads were about tethering, or cell service, or the new Autonet gadget. I think this beats them all as far as I can tell. Plus, apparently with Millenicom you can get a wireless router that will interface with the usb aircard for possible broadband access for your home environment allowing multiple users. This could also be used similarly to the way Autonet has their system - creating a hot spot and allowing other nearby chasers to join in the data via wifi.)
