Nationwide EV-DO Is Go For Verizon Wireless

from the now-we-need-some-competition dept

Thu, Jan 8th 2004 2:11am — Mike Masnick

Good news for those of you who want real wide area, high speed wireless internet access. Verizon Wireless, who has been testing out their EV-DO broadband wireless data in San Diego and Washington DC say that they're going to spend a billion dollars to offer it nationwide. The service is designed to give users downstream speeds of 300-500 kbps on a regular basis - though, upstream speeds are reported to be quite sluggish. This other report states that they're going to stick with their current pricing plan and charge $80/month for the service - which is a bit high. However, they're looking for the early adopter business users who won't mind paying that much. This is, of course, a similar strategy to the one that destroyed Metricom, but Verizon Wireless certainly has a lot more cash, and can (and should) adjust pricing as they go. While this should give Verizon Wireless the lead in true high speed wide area wireless broadband, it will be interesting to see how the other carriers react. If anything, it may force AT&T Wireless to drop the prices on their nationwide EDGE service (which is available now, also at $80/month - and advertises average speeds of 100 to 130 kilobits per second).

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Derek Kerton (profile), 8 Jan 2004 @ 2:11am

Don't Expect An AT&T Price Drop
The carriers rely on the ignorance of the customer as they price their data services. It seems that no matter the actual bandwidth speed, the price and the marketing spin stay the same. Cases in point: Verizon charges $80 for unlimited EV-DO, AT&T charges the same for unlimited EDGE, Sprint PCS charges the same for unlimited 1xRTT, and Cingular charges the same for unlimited GPRS. Each of them markets the data service as futuristic high-speed, always-on, next generation, super-duper data access.
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Chris Maresca, 8 Jan 2004 @ 10:58am

Sprint 3g
I've been using Sprint's 3g service for over a year (since fall of 2002), and I usually get about 124kbps. Last time I check the price (my company pays for it...) it was $100/month for unlimited service.

It works pretty much everywhere I tried it, including while skiing... No, not actually skiing, but at a ski resort in Lake Tahoe.

Chris.
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- Mike (profile), 8 Jan 2004 @ 11:02am
  
  Re: Sprint 3g
  The Sprint service is 1x-RTT based, and is really a 2.5G service. It's impressive that you're getting such high throughput, as most reports put it at about half of that rate. AT&T's EDGE service should be much faster than that, and the new EV-DO service should be a LOT faster. Sprint will eventually offer EV-DO, but it may take some time.
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EVDOguy, 15 Mar 2005 @ 9:29am

EVDO is awesome
EVDO has expanded a lot since this article. We started a web site that tracks coverage, news, tip, and lots more. Lots of cool how-to's on the site, for example, we had a 2 way video chat via EVDO with someone driving in their car. That is true wireless broadband.
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