Mobility Today takes an early sneak peek at the Franklin Wireless USB EVDO Card, which Sprint will be offering with its EV-DO wireless broadband service later this month. The card allows tablet PC and Mac laptop and desktop users (lacking a PCMCIA card slot) to connect to Sprint's EV-DO network (average downstream speeds of around 500kbps).

As we recently noted, Sprint has sped up its EV-DO Revision A deployment plans, and claims the current EV-DO network will serve 200 million people by year's end, while EV-DO revision A upgrades will be available to around 40 million customers in that same time-frame. Most sprint customers however won't see the faster speeds until 2007.

While Revision A is capable of some impressive peak speeds (3.1Mbps/1.8Mbps, potentially), it looks like Sprint's sustained speeds will be considerably slower - upstream speeds should increase from 70-144 kbps, to between 300 & 400kbps. Downstream speed increases will be less exciting: to 450-800 kbps from the current 400-700 kbps.

Latency should be improved as well; current EVDO customers see 150ms-400ms latency (worse if congested), which should be closer to 100ms once upgrades are completed.