Original post. I'm back from Baltimore with some news about XOHM, Sprint's new WiMAX system: it's fast, but coverage isn't even quite as good as Sprint promises - some of their edges are, well, a little edgy. I'm going to save the fully detailed results and reviews for PCMag.com, but give you a teaser here.

I ran six tests in different locations with both strong and weak signals. With a strong signal, I saw download speeds averaging 3.6 megabits, with my fastest test at a blazing 7.1 megabits. "Good" upload speeds varied from 416 kbps on up to a really impressive 2.1 megabits/sec.

But speeds dropped sharply with a weak signal. Downloads 'crawled' as low as 620 kbps and uploads fell to as low as 122 kbps. I still got several download results over 1 mbps even with a very weak signal, though.

Want the overall averages? That would be 2.3 megabits/sec down and 915 kbits/sec up, which fits into Sprint's advertised range of 2-4 megabits down and 500-1500 kbits up. That's faster than any other wide-area network that I've tested.

Latency results were also interesting. XOHM's average latency, at 133 ms, was much lower than that of cellular networks, which usually average around 200-250 ms. I got figures as low as 71 ms on one test.

On the train home, I ran into LAPTOP Magazine's Todd Haselton, who got even faster speeds than I did in his tests. His chosen locations got even better results than mine did, but he said he got stronger signals overall. WiMAX speeds are so dependent on signal strength.