Sounds very similar to the BOA offering then. I'd imagine they're about identical.

I've been using BOA ShopSafe for many years... long before BOA bought MBNA America which is who started the service originally. You can set expiration dates as short as 2 months. I've used it numerous times for shady websites.

The difference is that VZW proactively spends money preparing and upgrading their network. ATT spends money on their wireless network only as a reactionary measure, and then only when threatened with lawsuits and investigations by governments agencies... Shame on ATT for being so stupid to take on the iPhone without the facilities to properly execute.

VZW told Apple to go F themselves because they wanted a cut of the operating income. VZW doesn't cut anyone in. Just don't foget that crApple approached VZW first and were denied due to their unreasonable terms. I use VZW EV-DO Rev.A every single day, and routinely travel all around the country, from mountains to deserts to cities. I'm in telecom and primarily work long-haul fiber-optic transport.

Um, EDGE is no where near the speed of EV-DO Rev.A. I routinely pull down average 1 to 2 Mbps with my VZW EV-DO Rev.A Pantech USB aircard... EDGE average is max around 300 kbps... yes, 0.3 Mbps... I wouldn't call that comparable.

And besides, it's not the HSDPA 3G protocol ATT is using that sux... it's their HSDPA coverage, lack of appropriate backhaul capacity from the towers to the CO, and lack of appropriate Internet speed from the CO...

For what it's worth, VZW is presently running fiber to all of their towers to shovel the Cat3 copper infrastructure once and for all... they have committed to 30 Mbps on a rural tower and 100 Mbps on a metro tower... since most of the cost of running plant is labor, why run coax for 45 Mbps DS-3 circuits when you can run fiber and have, at present, up to 4 Tbps on it? ;o)

Full disclosure: I am a contractor to VZW working on converting their entire backhaul infrastructure--including to the towers--to Ethernet. Yeah, it's coming, and they're preparing... LTE/4G is just around the corner.

Ah yes, you are completely right. I had forgotten about that. Nothing like a too-little, too-late, knee-jerk reaction, though. They're all way behind on the future data curve.

Sprint will be (is?) first to market with their craptastic WiMax, and LTE will be rolled out by VZW publicly in 2010. All the others will follow and be playing catch-up.

ATT really annoys me. They don't like to spend any money at all, and are only now announcing plans to spend money reactively because they've been able to rip off and con so many iPhone users for so long now, and some of the iPhone users are starting to become disenchanted with the coverage and (lack of) data speeds. VZW, on the other hand, always has spent money proactively on infrastructure, and as such has generally been ahead of the game.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that... slipped my mind. Sprint has gone with WiMax for their 4G, which will make them first-to-market, and first-to-bankruptcy. ;o)

No. For now only VZW and Sprint have announced they're going to LTE; most everyone else is going to UMTS before evne thinking about LTE. VZW is leading the pack on LTE as they're already working on a trial with my company. VZW should have LTE public by middle of 2010, far ahead of anyone else. And it will be awesome. :o)

As a telecom worker, and having mobile phone service in the US and in Europe since the mid-1990s, I can say I hate Sprint and will never go back to them, ever, no matter what. I've had service from Cellular One, Airtouch, Sprint PCS, KPN (Netherlands), T-Mobile (the real one, in Germany), Tele2 (Germany), ATT Wireless (pre-GSM, and pre-Cingular), and VZW. I've had VZW now for five or six years and love it. I travel for a living around the whole country and rarely ever have any problems at all.

I had Sprint in the late 90s until 2001. For crisake they named their company after the frequency band NO ONE WANTS because it's CRAP ("PCS" = 1900 MHz). Every time I would pass a semi on the I-70 between Dayton and Columbus I would drop the call. Absolutely aggravating. And the phone I bought was their top-of-the-line model at the time, and was very expensive, and was some POS made by Dense that did everything brilliantly but actually let you talk.

VZW is more expensive, yes. But they're way more reliable. And they use 850 MHz band in most of the country; only 1900 MHz in the few areas they were late-to-market and the 850 MHz spectrum was already used up.

Sprint Nextel is dead on their feet. I know many people in VZW and do a lot of work for them, and we all agree. They're just biding their time, hoping someone buys them out.

Their generally horrible coverage, thanks to their generally horrible spectrum choice, has always led them to be a bargain for consumers, and most companies won't touch them. When they implemented PTT it sucked, too. So what did they do? They bought Nextel, a company using a proprietary Motorola protocol based on GSM and completely incompatible with the CDMA Sprint PCS was using. And now there are rumors Sprint Nextel will buy T-Mobile? Let's add a third incompatible protocol, because that just makes sense. You know, it's so quick and easy and cheap to switch out your entire infrastructure to be compatible.

If you and your colleagues have such experiences where Sprint has good coverage in your area, and VZW does not, you are in a very rare area indeed. And I implore you and everyone you know with VZW problems in your area, to call VZW and complain. They do listen to complaints, and they are eventually sent to the local offices and RF engineers. I promise.

This saving of electricity is exactly the reason I stopped running Distributed.net after many, many years of dutiful service, mostly at my employer's electric expense. Now that I'm trying to be much more enviro-friendly I would not have even run it back then. Oh well, make the future better, right?