Sprint Announces Addition to Rev. A Lineup
Feb 1, 2007, 10:44 AM by (staff)
Sprint and Novatel Wireless have announced that they will offer the Merlin EX720 by late February, Sprint's first Rev. A-capable ExpressCard. According to Sprint, it will be available via sales channels and retail stores and will cost $179.99 with two-year subscription. Along with the product announcement, Sprint is also adding several more markets to its Rev. A deployment (Southern Florida, Portland, Ore., and Puerto Rico) and raising its advertised EV-DO network speeds. Rev. A markets are seeing average upload speeds of 350-500 Kbps and download speeds of 600 Kbps - 1.4 Mbps, compared to previously advertised upload speeds of 50-70 Kbps and download speeds of 400-700 Kbps. No word on whether or not these are real-world speeds. Lastly, Sprint has also announced that the EX720, as well as the Novotel U720 and S720, will be able to take advantage of location-based services (LBS) through an upgraded version of the Sprint Connection Manager software.
Comments
Discrepancy?
real world speeds (Denver)
S720:
download - 800 kb/s - 1.3 mb/s
upload - 400 kb/s - 750 kb/s
Sierra 580:
download - 750 kb/s - 950 kb/s
upload - 100 kb/s - 140 kb/s
These speeds are averaged over a few days at different times of the day and in different parts of the city ranging from downtown to the foothills along I-70, trying to prevent system congestion and other variables from skewing the results.
There are a few times/places that the speeds are lower and some where it's faster, but these numbers average this.
Denver is almost fully covered with rev. A and there are only a few places where it will revert to 1xRTT. (you can select EVDO only in th...
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