Can you use an airave without telling sprint?

Answer 1

An airave has a very limited range. I get 5 bars if I'm in the room with the airave, but one room away and I get 2-3 bars. Since I live in a free standing structure, I don't worry about people leeching on my airave. I have a couple acres and lose the signal before I leave my property. (I have no strong signal from any cellular company where I live - without the airave my cell is useless at home.)

If I lived in an apartment building, I would expect my neighbors to use my airave. But an airave is limited to three users at once, and if you have three phones in your household, you want them to all have a channel.

By default, Airaves are not locked. That is, if you are near an airave (the airave is the strongest signal) and you have a sprint phone, it will use it. Now, you can ask that your airave be filtered so that if you live in an apartment building, your neighbors can't leech.

The filtering is done by phone number.

So, if that is the question you are asking, you do not have to tell sprint that you want to use an airave from your phone, it just works like a cell tower with a small range, if it is the strongest signal it will select it when you make a call. (You can roam from an airave to a regular tower but you can't roam from a tower to an Airave.)

But...an airave has to be associated with an account. There is a $5/month fee that used to be waived if you claimed bad reception but is not waived much anymore. The airave has to be used in an area where sprint is licensed to use the frequency band that Sprint is licensed for. So the first thing that the airave does is to establish its GPS position. Then it talks to a sprint server and it tells the sprint server its serial number and its position and it gets permission to talk. This process can take up to 15 minutes = after every internet outage or every power blip that takes more than a second.

So it is not ideal, but it beats the heck out of the alternative for me.

By the way, the Airave only talks to the sprint server - it does not talk to anything else. If you are browsing a web site and you are using the cell connection, you will appear to be coming from sprint's address, not your own ip address, just as you would if you were using a regular tower.