Do you find yourself out and about in the city enough that you hardly use your broadband at home? Neither do I, since said broadband is usually downloading the latest this-and-that while I’m gone, but it might be nice to have a “second line” of high-speed internet for when I don’t want to compete with 20 other people for a cafe’s wi-fi. Others, in cities where free wireless isn’t quite as plentiful as in Seattle, may find wireless broadband a more compelling option, and pretty soon you’ll be able to get it through Comcast in a few choice areas.

I find it interesting that Comcast says they’ll be offering the service, when really they’re doing no such thing. They’re offering Clearwire’s service and splitting the bill. At any rate, if you have Clearwire in your area, chances are you’ll soon be able to get it through Comcast and bundle it with your TV and stuff for a better price. Portland will be the first to see the service, so you Oregonians can do your little victory dance. I’ll wait.

The service, called “Comcast High-Speed 2go Metro” because someone thought that was a good idea, will run you $73 a month, but call now and you can get it for $50, a savings of $23(RIP Billy Mays)! You can also throw down an extra $20 to get access to Sprint’s 3G network. Not my style, though. For a blogger, the internet is his leash, and if you’re carrying it around with you, you’re never off. That’s assuming we’re ever really even on.

This Sunday, Sprint customers in the Baltimore area will be able to purchase a USB modem that’s capable of handling both 3G and 4G (Wi-Max) wireless signals. That’s a combined total of 7G!

The device – called the U300 – is made by Franklin wireless and will cost $149 with a two-year contract and after a $50 mail-in-rebate. It’ll also be available in Baltimore-area Best Buy stores early next year. Customers will be able to purchase a $79.99 per month data plan that includes both 3G and 4G access – 4G, of course, only being available in Baltimore at the moment.

Seems like it might not be a bad idea to roll this thing out in markets OTHER than just Baltimore so that people signing up for a 3G data plan don’t blow a fuse once 4G rolls out in their city and they have to go buy yet another device.

Remember, though, this new Sprint WiMax initiative is contract-less so if you’re planning to go 4G-only, you might want to just wait until it’s fully available in your area since adding 3G to the mix requires a two-year contract.

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Wireless provider Korean Telecom reportedly signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Apple to combine “WiBro, a third generation-based communications technology, with Apple’s hit products such as the MacBook laptops and iPod media players,” according to Unwired View.

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The promise of Wi-Max is nothing less than high-speed wireless internet practically anywhere you go. Of course, the reality falls short, as it often does, but it still shows itself a worthy successor to normal 3G and wi-fi. This industrious tester zoomed around Baltimore and tested it out in different areas (70% of the city is covered at the moment), finding that speeds were generally on the order of 3-4Mbps, or about 400KB/s. That’s plenty for me, personally, which is good because technical max of 20Mbps probably isn’t going to happen unless you’re perched on the WiMax tower.

Right now you can really only hit up the WiMax in Baltimore, but Sprint is working on dropping another $5bn into the rollout of a nation-wide network. Deep pockets! Maybe Sprint can help with the national debt.

Oh my! Three of the biggest laptop makers out there all announcing 4G/WiMAX/XOHM service. All on the same day, too. It’s almost as if it was planned. Acer has it in their big ones, Toshiba has it in their little ones, and Lenovo has it in just about their entire line.

Boy, with all these laptops sucking up the signal, they might want to put those WiMAX points on higher ground!

Laptop Magazine, the most popular laptop magazine in the Scranton Airport, jetted down to Baltimore where they tested Sprint’s XOHM service in the wild. The results, when compared to Verizon EV-DO were impressive. It took 6 minutes to download a 233MB video while EV-DO tool 24 minutes while web pages loaded in about half the time, consistently, when compared to EV-DO. Their video, live from a Starbucks in Charm City, is kind of unthrilling – it’s just a dongle – but where is EV-DO going once this goes live?

It’s real, ladies and germs. Sprint’s much anticipated and often thought vaporware service has finally gone live in Baltimore. The WiMAX service dubbed Xohm is 4G and boasts download speeds of 2-4 Mbps. Samsung is offering a Xohm-branded Express air card for $60 and ZyXEL has a Xohm modem for $80, which are both available starting today online or at select independent Baltimore retailers. You can, however, take advantage of the service right now if you own a Nokia N810 WiMAX edition tablet.

Pricing and plans vary with four different offerings. Read More

The WiMAX rollout should be right ’round the corner and Motorola is here with the USBw 100 adapter just in time. The companies first WiMAX device is coming in three tasty flavors – 2.3GHz, 2.5GHz and 3.5 GHz – to ensure a compatible version is available for your network’s frequency range. Thanks to multiple antenna technology and some Motorola wizardry, the USBw should provide seamless WiMAX network access. Pricing wasn’t announced, but Motorola at least let us know that it’s coming before the end 2008’s fourth quarter.

Note the BS

The biggest issue with 4G networks is handover. When you’re speeding down the highway, your cellphone and wireless devices constantly hop from station to station, picking up connectivity as you go along. In a perfect world, this handover is seamless but, as we all know, in the real world it isn’t poifect.

Nortel just tested their LTE standard with vehicles moving between coverage sites at about 60 miles an hour, a fairly large breakthroug in the 4G LTE spae. When will you get to use your own LTE dongle? Not in a while, sadly, but keep dreaming.

Instead of being stuck behind some A-hole driving 20 miles per hour under the speed limit while talking on his cell phone, you’ll soon be stuck behind a very similar A-hole trying to balance a laptop on his dashboard.

According to Twice.com, Chrysler’s parts division will begin selling “a Mopar car cellular/Wi-Fi hot spot, expected to be the first of many Internet offerings from the car companies” starting August 25th.

The hotspot device will be compatible with all 2009 Chrysler vehicles and certain earlier-year models. Customers will be able to order new cars with the device installed or bring compatible cars into Chrysler dealerships to have it retrofitted.

The router will cost $499 and will grab EVDO signals as well as WiMAX signals. The CEO of Autonet Mobile, the company that supplies the device to Chrysler, says that the router can be converted for use on all cellular networks. I’m assuming since Chrysler’s pushing EVDO, this will either be a Sprint or Verizon affair.

Interestingly, the monthly service charge will only be $29. That actually seems reasonable. Again, the device itself costs half a grand and you’ll need to fork over $35 to $50 for installation, followed by a $35 activation fee. The service will be sold by Chrysler as “Uconnect Web” starting at the end of the month.

After being delayed and delayed again, Sprint appears to finally be ready to roll out its high-speed WiMAX network, XOHM.

The service will be offered to consumers in Baltimore starting in September. It’s been tested in Chicago and the Baltimore-Washington D.C. area but September will be the first month that XOHM will be commercially available to everyone.

Chicago and Washington D.C. will get the service officially as well, likely not long after Baltimore. Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse said that the two cities would get XOHM later this year, according to InfoWorld. It’d stand to reason that a more widespread rollout would ensue early next year.

Sprint claims speeds of 2-4Mbps per user on the XOHM network. I’ll be most interested to see how it’s priced. If the monthly fees are aggressive enough, we might just see people ditching their cable and DSL connections altogether.

They’re saying WiMAX is the future, and it may well be, and many are gambling thusly. Flyvo is doing just that with this WiMAX-enabled handheld gaming system, the G100.

Featuring a 4-inch touchscreen and powered Windows CE (!?) Pro 5, the machine’s outfitted to play many games already available at sites like PocketGear.

It has WiFi and Bluetooth as well for multiplayer gaming and 4GB internal memory, not bad at all. It’s hitting SoKo first, but we should see it here by next spring. If it takes off, it could be the first mass market casual gaming device that could take on the coming iPhone wave.

Centrino 2 has finally seen the public, as Intel is previewing its next-gen wireless chipset this week at Computex. The chipset, known alternately as Montevina, features optional WiMAX connectivity as well as Wi-Fi and other wireless standards.

Intel is previewing the chipset in an Asus laptop and showing the WiMAX networking as it applies to gamers. Intel’s hoping to ship the chipsets at the end of summer.

WiMAX is the future of connectivity, and Intel know it. With service already available from companies like Clearwire, and others like Sprint promising nation-wide networks this year, Centrino 2 is going to be a hot seller for Intel.

An older technology, InspiAir was supposed to be the Wi-Fi of its day. It cost less than Wi-Fi and offered a 1 mile signal radius and considerably lower power at about 1MBps. A Dutch company, KMC Systems, bought the rights to the technology, renamed it Max-Fi, and could be rolling it out in the next few months in Europe.

Max-Fi gear was recently chosen by the Port of Antwerp, which has covered 30 square kilometers with just 14 access points. The network, which is currently in test, will support CCTV cameras for harbor control, voice-over-IP for port operations, and Internet access for visiting ships.

Interesting… is WiMax dead in the water? There have been quite a few moves to avoid WiMax in urban situations and even if Xohm takes off, that leaves plenty of room for some sort of Wi-Fi — after all T-Mobile and AT&T bet on the technology over even 3G cellular in most markets.