Hasta La Gadget!

Philly is now the nation’s most advanced wireless city. Clearwire just soft-launched their “Clear” WiMAX service in the Philadelphia metro area, offering claimed speeds of 3-6 megabits/sec for PC modems and the Samsung Mondi handheld device across a chunk of Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. If you want the speedy service, though, you’ll have to subscribe to Clear, not to their partner Sprint 4G, who have not yet launched in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia has an unusual number of high-speed, wide-area wireless networks. Folks in northeast Philadelphia can zip along on T-Mobile’s HSPA+ test network, the fastest form of 3G in the nation. The city has also been blanketed for a few years by a free Wi-Fi network that was once run by Earthlink, but is now operated by local organizations.

The Philadelphia launch is especially important for Clearwire because it’s their first city in the heavily populated northeast quarter of the US. Previously, CLEAR had been available in Atlanta, Las Vegas, Portland, OR, and some smaller cities outside the Northeast. Sprint’s 4G is also available in Baltimore, MD.