Virgin Mobile is 1-st with Pay as You Go 3G Mobile Broadband Service in US - Finally!

Pay as You is Popular in Europe

Pay as You go mobile broadband is ~~rather~~ wide spread in Europe, but here in North America, the only option to get online over mobile network has so far been tying yourself with minimum 2-year contract that will set you back cool $60 bucks/month or up to $175 in fees if you decide to quit.

Virgin Mobile is 1-st in USA

Not anymore. Virgin Mobile USA has just rolled out the Broadband2Go mobile broadband service sans contract.

Not much choice there as well, but… that’s a start.

How Does It Work?

Virgin is piggy backing on Sprint Nextel mobile data infrastructure, so depending on location you will be getting ~~up to the recent~~ high-tech EvDO RevA speeds ~~with theoretical limit of~~ up to 3.1 Mbps Download/1.8 Mbps Upload data transfer speeds.

Plans range from 100Mb for $10 and up to 1Gb for $60. There is one caveat, though: similar to pre-paid pay as you go cellular plans, the prepaid amount will expire within 10 (100Mb plan) to 30 days (all other plans) from the 1-st use.

The plan together with the Virgin’s Broadband2Go EvDO revA modem (actually MC760 made by Novatel Wireless) is available from BestBuy. In addition to 3G Mobile Broadband speeds, the modem packs cool integrated microSD slot for cards up to 8Gb, but unfortunately no GPS (which Sprint’s Compass 597 has!)

Bottomline

This could be rather a good option if you plan to use mobile broadband occasionally or is just sampling Sprint data network capabilities.

For frequent Mobile Internet Access, regular contract-based mobile broadband data plans may be preferable giving you up to 5Gb of data per month for $60, which is exactly 5 times more than you are going to get with Virgin.

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