Novatel's EV-DO Merlin XV620 ExpressCard gets PCMCIA approval
by Donald Melanson 
posted Jun 19th 2006 at 10:59PM
Novatel's announced that their EV-DO-rocking Merlin XV620 Wireless ExpressCard has gotten approved by the PCMCIA trade association, making it the first EV-DO ExpressCard on the market -- albeit a bit later than the rumored May launch. Still, the news should please users with a laptop that has an ExpressCard/34 slot but no built-in 3G support, who can now take advantage of the speedy, although somewhat pricey EV-DO network, getting data speeds up to 2.4 Mbps. Now, one of the biggest markets for the card would seem to be MacBook Pro users, but according to Novatel's website the XV620 only supports Windows XP and 2000. Which means Mac users will either have to forego their precious OS for the unfamiliar waters of Windows via Boot Camp or wait who knows how long for Novatel to release some native Mac drivers.
Filed under: Peripherals, EV-DO
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Scott @ Jun 20th 2006 5:11PM
The Novatel company line on this card in the past, in regards to MacTel drivers, is that Apple would be providing them in an update. Were that to happen I would be awfully tempted to abandon happy GSM land for hot and foxy EVDO action.
Alan A. Reiter @ Jun 21st 2006 10:08PM
Data rates of up to 2.4Mbps? Who has been feeding you this line? You're way, way off the mark.
Real world download speeds for today's 1xEV-DO according to Sprint and Verizon are around 400K bps - 700K bps. And, it's definitely not not unusual to get speeds of less than that, say, 250K bps - 350K bps, depending on your location and channel loading.
Upload speeds are dramatically less, perhaps 70K bps, plus or minus 20K bps or so.
You might get a burst of speed that could even reach about 1Mbps down, but that's very rare. To be safe, count on download speeds of about 300K bps - 500K bps and you generally won't be disappointed.