EV-DO Rev. A hits

Cellcos have this love-hate relationship with wireless VoIP. It's clearly a wave that is going to hit their networks and business plans hard, so they're playing a classic holding-pattern. Some carriers are falling back on restrictive usage terms, threatening to cut off customers whose data use patterns are way out of "normal." It's hard to blame them because when it comes right down to it, the data side of cell networks simply can't handle intensive wireless VoIP usage. That's why the latest revision of EV-DO is so important. Its data rates are plenty high enough to support VoIP, and Verizon and Sprint Nextel are racing to get it installed. Sprint got out of the box first, but it's turning out that Verizon has been deploying like mad but not announcing it until it has big chunks of its network read to go. The winners will be customers, who will be getting more throughput faster than anyone thought.