Sprint and Verizon users have enjoyed true broadband speeds with EV-DO for some time now. Verizon has most of the nation covered with it’s rich broadband signal and is nearly complete with a nation-wide rollout. Sprint isn’t far behind. Cingular, however, has been trying to push EDGE, an upgrade to GPRS, as broadband for some time while it built up it’s true 3G network, HSDPA. Cingular is finally ready and it has flipped the switch. It is now allowing customers to sign up for the high-speed network that will transfer between 400kbps and 700kbps which is comparable to EV-DO.
Only a few problems with Cingular’s announcement. There aren’t too many places you can get this from (cities include: Austin (TX.), Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Portland (OR.), Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose (CA.), Seattle, Tacoma (Wash.) and Washington D.C.) and there aren’t too many devices that can take advantage of the speed. In fact, there are only two devices that can whip down those web sites in the acclaimed speed and those devices slip into a laptops PC Card slot. Yup, no phones. Further, you’ll be paying some hefty bank for the service at $80 a month if you don’t have a Cingular account and it’s a couple of decades cheaper if you do. Oh ya, one last oddity about the press release, it keeps mentioning UMTS along with HSDPA and the former is much slower then later. Using the two in the same breath as “broadband” is like saying AOL is 10 times faster with AOL Acceleration technology.
[tags]cingular,umts,hsdpa,broadbandconnect[/tags]