Additionally, the following airports that are not already in one of the above cities will have EV-DO service: Dallas/Fort Worth International, Love Field (Dallas), George Bush Airport (Houston), William P. Hobby Airport (Houston), Jacksonville International (Florida), Louis Armstrong International (New Orleans), Orlando International, and Sky Harbor International (Phoenix).
Verizon claims that the new service, which will be available for US$79.99 for an unlimited access plan, will allow users to achieve broadband download speeds of from 300 to 500 Kbps. At a demo of the new service that we attended, that seemed to be a conservative estimate. In fact, Verizon's Harry Martin said that when outdoors, speeds of 800 to 900Kbps wouldn't be surprising. Considering the snappiness that web pages were loading for us inside the hotel where the demo took place, I wouldn't be surprised at all with such speeds.
The demo we saw made use of the new PC 5220 EV-DO card that Verizon is offering. For you tech-heads out there, the latency of the connection to the internet through the PC 5220 card hovered around the 120 to 140ms mark, depending on what servers we were pinging. That is definitely within acceptable limits for business users. The PC 5220 card will also fall back onto the existing 1xRTT network when you move outside of the EV-DO coverage zones. Like the existing nationwide 1xRTT network, the new EV-DO network supports upload speeds of around 40 to 60Kbps - which is far less than existing land-line based broadband services.
