True wireless broadband is coming to the U.S. this year and next.

Verizon Is Crossing The U.S. With Speedy, True Wireless Access

True wireless broadband is coming to the U.S. this year and next. By the end of 2005, courtesy of Verizon Wireless, you should be able to wirelessly connect a laptop, PDA or cellphone to the Internet at real broadband speeds from almost any location in every major U.S. metropolitan area.

By Walt Mossberg Wall St. Journal

http://www.wsj.com

I’m not talking about the spread of more Wi-Fi "hot spots" in airports, coffee shops and similar places. I’m talking about wireless high-speed Internet service that you can use just about anywhere — even on the street or in a car.

This isn’t a pipe dream. I’ve been testing Verizon’s new service, called BroadBand Access, on a laptop around Washington, D.C., one of the first two cities where the company has rolled it out. I am very impressed. It is simple to set up and works just like any other broadband connection, with your normal Web browser and e-mail program.

Based on a new cellphone technology called EV-DO (short for Evolution-Data Optimized), the new Verizon service is as fast as most wired DSL lines, and it worked effortlessly almost everywhere I tried it in a wide swath of Washington and its suburbs.

Verizon claims the new service will deliver average downstream speeds of between 300 and 500 kilobits per second. That is three to five times as fast as the typical speeds available over older cellphone networks, and about what many people get from wired DSL lines.

In my tests, the service did even better. Over several days, I averaged 585 kilobits per second. In fact, much of the time I was connected at over 700 kbps. The service can achieve peak speeds of more than two megabits a second, but I never saw that.

Setting up and using the service on my test laptop was a breeze. I just installed a software program Verizon supplied, popped a special Verizon modem into the laptop’s PC card slot, unfolded the modem’s small built-in antenna and clicked Connect.
[EV-DO laptop card from Verizon]
EV-DO laptop card from Verizon

I was able to download large files rapidly, to play streaming video and audio smoothly, and to receive easily hundreds of e-mails, some with very large attachments, at a speed that felt like I was in the office. I did all this in a variety of businesses, homes, cars, restaurants and shops all over the D.C. area.

And Verizon achieves these speeds without compressing, and therefore degrading, graphics on the Web — a trick wireless carriers use.

Verizon’s new service is much faster than the heavily touted 3G wireless networks being rolled out in Europe this year. Those networks peak at 384 kilobits per second and have typical speeds of around 200 kbps.

If you’re using Verizon’s EV-DO system and you go out of coverage range, the modem gracefully switches you to a slower Internet service that, in my tests, registered speeds of between 60 and 100 kbps. I only dropped out of high-speed coverage once I got about 25 miles from downtown.

Right now, you can only use Verizon’s BroadBand Access service on a laptop, not a cellphone or PDA. And it’s only available in D.C. and San Diego.

But Verizon plans to roll out the service in all major markets by the end of 2005. Additional cities will come online starting this summer, and by the end of 2004, the service will be available on about a third of Verizon’s network, covering 80 million people. New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are likely to be among the metro areas added this year.

It is likely Verizon will go beyond laptop access by the end of the year as well, offering one or two phones and a souped-up PDA that can use the EV-DO network.

The only big downside to this new service is price. Verizon charges $149, after rebate, for the modem. That’s not bad, but the monthly fee for unlimited Internet connectivity is $80, which is high.

For the service to become truly popular, the price should be more like $50 a month, around what wired broadband often costs. In fact, at that price, it’s possible some consumers who travel a lot might choose to use EV-DO instead of wired broadband in their homes and offices.

Verizon warns that as more people use the network, maximum speeds could drop, but the company believes it can maintain the promised average speeds of 300-500 kbps, even with many more users onboard.

For comparison, I looked at a competing high-speed internet service offered by AT&T Wireless called EDGE, which is available nationally today. AT&T claims EDGE speeds averaging 100 to 150 kilobits per second, and bursts of up to 200 kbps. But in my tests in Washington, using the same laptop, AT&T speeds averaged a paltry 82 kpbs, without compression. And AT&T charges the same $80 monthly fee Verizon does for unlimited access.

I only ran into one problem with the Verizon service. On one occasion, when I lost the connection, the software wouldn’t let me reconnect until I rebooted the computer. But this didn’t occur on the two other times I lost the connection, and Verizon says there’s a workaround for the problem.

One other small downside to the new offering: upload speeds are still slow, just 40-60 kbps.

All in all, though, Verizon’s new wireless Internet service is terrific. I highly recommend it for mobile Internet users.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at [email protected]

ABOUT WALT MOSSBERG
Walt Mossberg is the author and creator of the weekly Personal Technology column in The Wall Street Journal, which has appeared every Thursday since 1991. The goal of the column is "to take the consumer’s side in the struggle to master the machine, to deliver a weekly dose of useful information in plain English, but in a way that never condescends to our readers just because they can’t tell one chip from another."

Mr. Mossberg also writes the Mossberg Solution, which premiered April 9, 2002, and Mossberg’s Mailbox. He is also a contributing editor of Smart Money, the Journal’s monthly magazine, where he writes the Mossberg Report column. On television, Mr. Mossberg appears frequently as a technology commentator for the CNBC network.

Mr. Mossberg has been a reporter and editor at the Journal since 1970. He is based in the Journal’s Washington, D.C., office, where he spent 18 years covering national and international affairs before turning his attention to technology.

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