Mobile Broadband.

This article takes a look at whether the mobile broadband technology has lived up to its hype as of February 28, 2005. In 2001, the U.S. mobile telecommunications claimed that wireless broadband delivered over 3G networks was just around the corner. As it turned out, the industry had little stomach for the huge costs of deploying 3G. Instead, using infrastructure upgrades they needed for voice traffic anyway, the carriers trotted out an alphabet soup of so-called 2.5G solutions. But the resulting speeds were closer to dial-up than true broadband--even though Sprint and Qualcomm liked to call their technology the first phase of 3G. Thankfully, the mobile broadband train is finally arriving in the station. Verizon has already deployed its EvDO (evolution, data optimized) service--with downstream data rates of 300 kilobits per second (Kbps) to 500Kbps--to six major U.S. metropolitan areas, and it plans to cover the nation by the end of the year. Sprint will be next, although it lags behind Verizon in EvDO deployment. Meanwhile, Cingular has inherited UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) technology from its AT&T Wireless acquisition, which is slightly slower than EvDO but also available in six major cities.