Verizon has announced that its EV-DO high-speed wireless network will be expanded from its current three city market on the 27th to include Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Kansas City (<3), LA, Miami, Milwaukee, New York (yay!), Philly, Tampa, and West Palm Beach. This is extremely good news... sort of. EV-DO is super-fast - basically the best wireless high-speed option we have in the US at the moment - but Verizon currently only offers the service via a PCMCIA PC Card for laptops; not a single cell phone supports the network. That's somewhat understandable, as the best way to utilize the 300 - 500kbps download rate (more like 100 -150 in real world situations) of the EV-DO networks is to use a laptop, but what about smartphones (or people with laptops without PCMCIA)? It seems a shame that all that juicy bandwidth is out there for the subscribing to, but there isn't a practical way for many of us to use it (and if I'm going to pay $80 a month extra, then I certainly want to be able to use that bandwidth on every device I own). Also, if it's anything like it is here in Manhattan, if you already have one of the EV-DO PCMCIA cards from Verizon, you might already be able to connect to the networks. Read – Verizon Wireless to Expand 3G Network [eWeek]
