Sprint Nextel proudly announced its latest offering, the EV-DO Revision A network cards for laptops. Promising to increase average download speeds to 450 kilobits per second to 850kbps and upload speeds to between 300 kbps and 400 kbps, the new Novatel Wireless S720 Mobile Broadband cards definitely has more boost than its current version, which provides downloads between 400kbps and 700kbps with upload speeds of about 50kbps to 70kbps.

Sold through Sprint business sales channels, as well as online, for $249.99, the offer comes with a two-year subscriber contract, which can be availed by users for about $99.99 with a two-year subscriber agreement. Currently, service plans for the card range from $39.99 per month for 40 megabytes to $79.99 per month for unlimited data usage. With the two-year service contract, customers can get the unlimited data package for $59.99 per month.

Hopefully, Sprint will do their upgrades soon on their network to EV-DO Revision A Network. Without the upgrades, this speedier wireless laptop cards will be all for naught.

As EV-DO technology has become more and more popular over time the variety of solutions available to meet the needs of EV-DO users has become equally diverse. Carriers like Verizon and Sprint are currently in the process of maintaining and, in some cases, upgrading their EV-DO network infrastructure to keep up with the expected demand. The depth of the financial investment in network infrastructure alone demonstrates an iron clad commitment to the future of this technology on the part of the carriers.

The new AirCard 597E from Sierra Wireless is evidence that the next generation of EV-DO (known as Revision A) will be a viable competitor in the future of high speed wireless data services, and the investment will not have been in vain. "Built for notebook computers with ExpressCard expansion slots, the AirCard 597E will be fully compliant with network operator requirements and will offer user-friendly features such as Assisted GPS (aGPS) location based services; a robust, fixed antenna design; and an external antenna jack for flexibility and improved reception in fringe coverage areas or for specialized applications. The AirCard 597E is expected to begin shipping in the first quarter of 2007. ExpressCard models for HSDPA networks are expected to follow later in the year."

Sierra Wireless has been carefully watching the market and has plans to benefit from an overall trend in consumer habits that they expect to peak in 2007. "Notebook installations of ExpressCard slots are expected to move toward critical mass in 2007 - we are timing our ExpressCard products to match market adoption." said Trent Punnett, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Corporate Development for Sierra Wireless.

Since Dell and Apple (along with most all of the other manufacturers of laptops in the world) have moved to the express standard and basically abandoned the older PCMCIA standard, the market for express based network and storage solutions is expected to continue to grow. Eventually, everything will be done without wires, under one universal standard that is expandable, extensible, modular and fully self-sufficient (yeah right!). Until then we are left to choose between the various competing standards available today until we find a winner.

The inevitable, evolutionary movement towards the Revision A standard, that all EV-DO network providers will eventually undergo, moved a little faster recently as Sprint became the first provider to offer a wireless EV-DO card that's Rev A compatible.

The revision A standard of EV-DO (used by CDMA cellphone providers Verizon and Sprint) will provide speeds of 3Mbits per second when downloading and almost 2Mbits per second in the opposite direction.

The lower latency and better connectivity rates of the updated standard will make latency dependent technology like VOIP possible over an EV-DO connection. The new standard is also completely backwards compatible, but the higher speeds associated with Rev A are only achieved when a Rev A compatible wireless card is connected to an access point or gateway that is configured to accept traffic using the new standard.

In other words, until the carriers (Sprint and Verizon) upgrade their networks to operate within the new standard, the newly released Sprint Rev A compatible EV-DO card will only be capable of current generation speeds.

Current generation EV-DO speeds are decent (between 400 and 800 KBytes per second down and up to 400 KBytes Uploading), making it somewhat difficult to justify paying more for this new Rev A card before the carriers even upgrade their networks.

Until the network providers begin the task of upgrading their networks to Rev A, the new Merlin S720 will likely only appeal to EV-DO enthusiasts. However, if you are the type that always wants to get the latest toys before everyone else, the Merlin S720 might just be an ideal investment for you.

Current generation CDMA2000 1xEV-DO provides decent speeds in both directions (512 Down and 128 Up), with potential bursts up to 2Mbps when downloading. Unfortunately, problems with high latency, inefficiency and limited upload speeds have conspired to make this version of EV-DO into nothing more than another step in the evolution of the growing technology.

Revision A is the next step in the evolution of EV-DO. Verizon Wireless, having chosen to follow the CDMA/EV-DO path instead of the GPRS/EGDE path, is now faced with the challenge of upgrading its entire network to the newer Revision A standard of EV-DO. Verizon's decision to continue using Lucent to build and upgrade its network will be helpful to the upgrade process, since all of Verizon's current hardware and software was created by Lucent.

When the Revision A upgrade is complete, users of the network can expect to see download speeds increase to a maximum of about 3Mbps down and 1.8 up. The increased throughput comes with the additional side benefits of lower latency and a more efficient and better functioning network overall.

With the switch, Verizon plans to offer additional services to customers that will take full advantage of the network's new found robustness. Voice over IP, streamed video and other multimedia applications will be available that would not be possible without the upgrades to the network. Hopefully, they will also find a way to bring the price down and make the EULA's that we sign more fair!