Apparently feeling a little celebratory after negotiating lower wholesale rates for voice and data, British MVNO Virgin Mobile has said that it intends to start offering broadband data cards some time in the fourth quarter of the year. In the UK, Virgin operates on top of T-Mobile's wireless backbone, so customers of the new data service should have a pretty nice HSDPA footprint with which to work -- a totally upside-down version of the US picture, where Virgin uses Sprint, offers no data cards (hell, they barely admit the existence of data on their handsets), and rocks CDMA to the core. Weird how the world works sometimes.

Again, Verizon isn't really all about the surprises today, with an inconspicuous Rev A launch, and now the release of this USB720 Rev A modem from Novatel more or less right on target, but there ain't nothing wrong with that. Sure, they're playing catch-up to Sprint on this front as well, but everybody's gotta start somewhere, and Verizon has picked tomorrow to start handing out these USB modem dongles. And by "handing out" we of course mean charging $150 to people who sign up for a new two-year customer agreement, and $200 to the one-year types. Plus you'll need to pick up an unlimited data plan for all those gigabytes you'll be pulling, which will run you $60 a month on top of an existing $40 voice plan, or $80 a month all by its lonesome. Not cheap by a long shot, but just think of all those neat things Verizon wants you to do with that bandwidth, like blaze through torrents, make p2p Skype calls, share your connection with friends and email your mom! The modem will be available immediately on line and in B2B channels, to be followed by a retail launch on the 20th.

Instead sitting back and frowning on bandwidth hogging EV-DO to WiFi routers, Sprint has decided to jump into the game themselves with a new device made by Linksys. Accompanying the new router -- which, like current solutions, merely hosts existing PCMCIA EV-DO cards -- is a new USB dongle that brings EV-DO functionality to owners of laptops that lack PC card slots, or adventurous desktop users. Both products are due in the second half of this year, with the router going for "slightly under $200." The USB dongle still lacks a price, but we imagine it will be rather popular, especially for MacBook Pro owners with their incredibly functionless ExpressCard slots.

[Thanks, Michael]