EVDO – How I love thee!

Posted on by

So I’m stuck here in Kansas City airport on my way to San Francisco and I not that upset as I have my trusty Sprint EVDO card with me and I’m getting an average of 1 MB download speed. Who needs WiFi when EVDO gives you all the bandwidth you need and it’s almost everywhere. I have been getting 1 MB from my Sprint card consistently and the connection seems as reliable if not more so than the standard 802.11x connections I typically use when I travel. EVDO rocks! 🙂

Advertisement

4 thoughts on “EVDO – How I love thee!”

  2. So could this someday = a replacement for sat. radio? Meaning that it might get integrated into devices or devices would be made that would accept a card and would let you stream audio from your favorite shoutcast?

    I still think all the towers and service areas point to a satellite solution for carrying IP traffic to all devices that want it.

    Like

  3. Hi Derek and yes. Sprint, Verizon and others will typically sell you the card for $99 and then you pay a monthly fee for usage. There are a ton of deals where you pay more for the card for a shorter contract or pay nothing for longer term contract. Typical all-you-can-eat monthly charges are $50-$70. As EVDO based routers that convert EVDO to WIFI become more pervasive, I think people will be able to drop their DSL and Cable-modem subscriptions and just use these cell networks for all their connectivity needs.

    Like

  4. Hi Mark. I guess this can replace Satellite radio today – XM and Sirrus both let you listen over the Internet and so if you have a subscription, you could potentially use the Internet connectivity to listen to your radio subscription. I think EVDO still has ways to go from the reliability standpoint and the cell networks will probably get saturated when more people start using 3G/EDGE services provided by their phones and PC cards. I’ve got a Sprint phone (Samsung A-920) and I get about 300-500 KBs when I use it for dial-up networking using the USB cable. I get about the same on my Cingular phone using Bluetooth networking. More and more, people are going to start using the data-services on their phones and so the cell networks are going to have to start thinking about their POPs getting saturated.

    Some newer laptops are coming with these 3G/EVDO cards pre-built in, ready to be wireless out of the box along the traditional 802.11x WiFi. Om Malik wrote an interesting piece about this last year about why laptops manufactures are jumping on the bandwagon. Soon you could see these modems built into PDA’s and other portable devices.

    Like

Comments are closed.