They probably stopped giving them out because of all the reported problems with them. My new 3G Airave works great for data, but is absolutely atrocious for voice calls. We end up unplugging ours half the time because of the trouble we have with it while making voice calls. It works great for data, supplying reliable 3G data service throughout the house, even while in the basement, which we could never get before getting the Airave, but it is terrible for making voice calls. I don't think Sprint and/or Samsung had all the bugs worked out of these new 3G units before they starting pushing them out.
My unit works great for 3G data, but when it comes to voice calls, my unit suffers from audio dropouts every few seconds, on 9 out of 10 calls. It also refuses to hand-off any calls when you leave the range of the Airave. When you leave the effective range of my Airave, your call just gets dropped, instead of being handed-off to the surrounding cell towers like it should. That is only a problem when making/taking calls as you are leaving the house and jumping into a car, but the near constant audio dropouts are a huge problem.
Like I said, my unit is unplugged 75% of the time. If it wasn't absolutely free, I would have sent it back already. Where we live, we usually only get 1 bar of service at our house, which seems to suffice for voice calls, but we could never get reliable data service. So when we want data, we plug in the airave and hope we don't need to take/make any calls. If we do, we usually end up unplugging the Airave and having to call the person back after the call is dropped and we are back on the towers.
I feel bad for anybody who got stuck paying for one of these things.