I've been using a Sprint AIRAVE*[1] in my home for almost three years. This product seems to do something similar but without the requirement of your home network
It's been a must have for my in now both a low-income city and rural New Jersey. Without the extra signal support I am constantly dropping calls and having the audio cut out.
I've been using Xubuntu for the last week, after some setup i've begun to fall in love with XFCE. I tend to flip distros every few weeks since all of my programming is done through Vagrant + offsite Git.
As far as servers go, we've been using CentOS and it's slowly built up to become a pain in the buns. I'm considering trying out Debian for our servers, but I don't want to bring my desktop distro habits over to our stack.