EVDO For Dummies

You should be excited about the beginning of the EVDOlution.

Let’s break this down, crash-course style, so the baby-boomers can understand:

In short, EVDO (Evolution Data Only) is another way to connect to the internet.

Why do you need another way to connect to the internet when your trusty old dial-up works just fine?

It’s all about speed, efficiency, technology, and convenience. (… And vanity for some, but we’ll touch on that later.)

Well, Pops, you might have noticed a youngin’ or two sitting at a coffee shop fiddling around on miniature computers. Sometimes, those computers aren’t even plugged in to anything. How do they do that?

Since the birth of your dial-up modem, communications technology, in general, has made gigantic leaps forward.

There is now broadband technology (DSL, Cable, Satellite, T1, T2, T3), which gives you the ability to send and receive information infinitely faster than your dial-up is able.

Now that we’re up to speed with the speed of broadband, let’s explore the concept of portability:

How can a person connect to the internet without being plugged in?

You should be able to grasp this one easily, Grampa. Remember back in ‘Nam when you learned about the science of radio transmission? Basically, when you use a radio or walkie-talkie, your voice is broken up into little pieces of information and transmitted through the air using radio waves. The receiving walkie-talkie puts all that information back together, and amplifies it through a speaker. Now, imagine that your computer has a voice, let’s call its language binary; (binary is basically just 1’s and 0’s). Let’s also imagine that your computer has an internal walkie-talkie (a wireless card). Your computer can speak its language into that wireless card, which encodes the information and sends it through the air using radio waves. The information is then decoded by a receiving device, which sends it to the desired destination. Your wireless card can also receive information, decode it and translate it so that you can read it in the form of a web page, email, etc.

We call this computer walkie-talkie technology, WiFi.

WiFi is wonderful! You can surf the internet without being plugged into a modem. You can take your work with you to a coffee shop, or any other WiFi hotspot, get on the internet, and do whatever it is that baby-boomers do on the internet.

The only problem with this technology is that you have to be within range of a WiFi hotspot.

What is a WiFi hotspot?
A WiFi hotspot is a place where you can receive a WiFi signal. Typically, your computer needs to be within 30 meters (100 feet) of a wireless router. (A wireless router is a device that sends the internet from the modem to your computer and back again via radio waves.)

This is the problem solved by EVDO.

EVDO allows you to be your own hotspot! It makes your computer as connected as your cell phone. EVDO works similarly to WiFi, in that the information is transmitted via radio waves, and that it is just as fast, but unlike WiFi you can connect to the internet almost anywhere– in the train, in your car or even at the football stadium. Like cell phone networks, you need to be in an EVDO service area for the technology to work.

Verizon Wireless is pioneering this technology, and is busily beefing up the EVDO network, so that its coverage will be as vast as its cell phone network coverage is in the near future. EVDO will also be available on the Sprint network.

In Canada, EVDO is available in select markets through Bell Mobility and Telus Mobility.

Grampa digs? Grampa wants EVDO?
Grampa can get EVDO here or here if he prefers Sprint to Verizon.

Questions about WiFi or EVDO? Leave a comment and I will answer them.