Getting broadband used to mean snaking Ethernet cables through your house. Now you don't even need to be at home. Sprint's Overdrive delivers wireless internet with speed that's comparable to what you'd get from a cable modem, provided you're in the right city.
Most U.S. carriers offer reasonably fast 3G wireless data, which tops out at about one megabit per second. Sprint is the first American carrier to start rolling out a faster 4G connection, available so far in 29 cities including Austin, Texas, where we put it through its paces during the SXSW Music, Film and Interactive Festival.
Like the Verizon MiFi, which we reviewed last year, the Sprint Overdrive takes a wireless data connection and uses it to establish a local Wi-Fi hotspot you can connect your devices to.
The Overdrive behaves pretty much like a regular Wi-Fi router, with all the standard options (including security), except that you can unplug and carry it out the door and it still works just as well as it did at home.
It only supports up to five devices at a time, which is enough for your laptop, cellphone, iPad, portable gaming device and digital camera. In our tests of a new unit at the default settings, we squeezed just shy of three hours of battery life out of the device while engaged in typical internet usage (browsing, e-mailing, uploading a video file, streaming music). Crucially, that's just enough for a morning telecommuting session from a park or coffee shop, although we wish an optional battery pack were available to keep us online longer before we had to retreat to a power outlet.
So, just how fast is Sprint's 4G network? On a Wi-Fi-connected Motorola Droid, we averaged 1.53 Mbps downstream. On a laptop, our connection speed using the Overdrive was 3.16 Mbps downstream and 0.59 Mbps upstream. Given that the average American broadband speed was 3.9 Mbps in Q3 of 2009, according to Akamai's most recent report, the Overdrive lives up to its promise of delivering mobile broadband.