Comment The article is not accurate (Score 2, Informative) 202
I am an engineer who works for a company that makes base station-side software and hardware for this product. We are a supplier to Nortel, who is the general contractor for the San Diego deployment. Since I personally wrote a lot of the code that makes this stuff work, I can speak somewhat authoritatively on this technology.
First of all, EV-DO does scale. There are 5 million subscribers in Korea alone, shared between SK telecom and KT freetel. The technology has also been rolled out in a big way in Japan by KDDI recently.
It is true that the current Verizon deployment uses only PCMCIA cards. But phones are on the way later this year. There are dozens of EV-DO enabled phones and handheld devices available. Check out this page. EV-DO is data only, but nothing says that end-user devices cannot be EV-DO + 1x-RTT.
The article says that this is not "always on". That is misleading. EV-DO has the concept of "sessions" and "connections". Sessions are always on, and connections are on an as-needed basis. Connections are set-up when the user needs to send/receive data and torn down when he is done. This happens automatically, the user does not have to do anything special when he needs to do something. (For e.g., just click on a link on slashdot and a new connection is set up, data is uploaded and subsequently downloaded from the website, and the connection is torn down. All this happens automatically, the technology takes care of everything).
This is not a LAN technology. It is not a replacement for WiFi. This is a CDMA-based, cellular-WAN technology. It automatically provides all the security of a CDMA-based network. Not that this is perfect, but it is much better than WiFi in that w.r.t. security.
Hari.
First of all, EV-DO does scale. There are 5 million subscribers in Korea alone, shared between SK telecom and KT freetel. The technology has also been rolled out in a big way in Japan by KDDI recently.
It is true that the current Verizon deployment uses only PCMCIA cards. But phones are on the way later this year. There are dozens of EV-DO enabled phones and handheld devices available. Check out this page. EV-DO is data only, but nothing says that end-user devices cannot be EV-DO + 1x-RTT.
The article says that this is not "always on". That is misleading. EV-DO has the concept of "sessions" and "connections". Sessions are always on, and connections are on an as-needed basis. Connections are set-up when the user needs to send/receive data and torn down when he is done. This happens automatically, the user does not have to do anything special when he needs to do something. (For e.g., just click on a link on slashdot and a new connection is set up, data is uploaded and subsequently downloaded from the website, and the connection is torn down. All this happens automatically, the technology takes care of everything).
This is not a LAN technology. It is not a replacement for WiFi. This is a CDMA-based, cellular-WAN technology. It automatically provides all the security of a CDMA-based network. Not that this is perfect, but it is much better than WiFi in that w.r.t. security.
Hari.
