Republic Wireless - A Month in a Review
So, last week I received my Republic Wireless phone. For those who don’t know, Republic Wireless is a new cell service that is attempting to merge wifi voip with a traditional cell service. They piggy back on Sprints network, so when you are in an area that you can’t connect to wifi, you still have 3G. There is still a little confusion on exactly how much 3G data / voice amounts you have access to, so I can’t really comment on that too much just yet. They are charging $19 a month for this service. That’s the HUGE selling point for me. Laura and I are currently spending around $180 for our two phones…so if this works out, I could save over $130 a month.
I pretty much shutoff my Verizon Wireless phone as soon as the Repubic Wireless came in the mail. There are some Youtube videos out there showing the unboxing and demoing the phone. I’m not going to touch on that as I don’t feel a review of the phone is important as much as how well the service is working.
I’ve made serveral phone calls at my house over Wifi and the call quality has been amazing. I did have one call drop, but I’m not sure if it was on my end or the other. I’ve made a couple calls on 3G and it’s what you’d expect from Sprint 3G. When I’m at home or in the office, I’m connected to the wifi so all my data runs through there. However, at work Wifi is much more restricted, so I can’t make any voip calls over the wifi. That’s something to keep in mind, if the wifi you conect to is restricted, you might lose the voip ability.
I know this isn’t much of an indepth review, there’s not a whole hell of a lot to review. At this point, after a week with it, I’m ready to drop VZW for me and rely strictly on this. I’m just waiting to find out about porting my number out. We’ll see what happens.
