You can only get XOHM equipment at a handful of independent retailers -- XOHM kiosks are coming to the big shopping malls next week. I picked up my XOHM card at Wireless One in Baltimore, where Yossi Ben-Or told me they sold out of their first run of 15 Samsung ExpressCards in one day. Of 15 home XOHM modems for desktop PCs they got, they sold 12 in one day. He's already tapped out, and waiting for his next shipment, which arrives within a few days. Metro II, a store on Reisterstown Road in Baltimore, said they're down to 3 cards.

Of course, this is a very early allotment. I counted eight stores near downtown Baltimore selling cards, according to XOHM's Web site. So the number of cards out there is currently in the hundreds. Obviously, Sprint would prefer that it end up their subscribers counting in the hundreds of thousands.

Ben-Or said that "students" have been snapping up his XOHM cards, looking for high-speed home Internet connections with no contract and no credit check. Maybe that's the real selling point of WiMAX. It's something that we don't think about enough around here: while many other services require you to sign up for a contract, XOHM is available month-to-month.