Sprint to offer EVDO/WiFi router

Sprint announced at CTIA Las Vegas that they will introduce an EVDO-WiFi router and a USB EVDO dongle later this year. These products can turn any Sprint EV-DO card connection into an 802.11g local-area network, according to business marketing program manager Larry Sherrard. The press release is here.

I've already blogged about the radio planning issues that this might cause. And Martin Sauter brought to my attention just recently the Linksys router with an EVDO PCMCIA slot. This is the one that Sprint will offer. Kyocera and a few other vendors offer similar devices.

At $60pm for Sprint subs and $80pm for non-subs this appears to be priced for the SME market moreso than residential.

But what about radio planning and backhaul capacity? Sprint aims to have 190 million people covered by EVDO by the end of this year. And full Rev A coverage by end 2007. They're also going to decommission Nextel's iDEN network and increase cell sites by 40%. And then there's something about announcing a 4G "wireless interactive multimedia" technology later this year......

They've got A LOT going on. Can they pull it off while at the same time offering a good broadband service? Any thoughts from the blogosphere?