Mobile premium is 4x

I like Sprint. They're always doing stuff which give me things to talk about.

Take their announcement about offering Novatel's Merlin S720 EVDO Rev A data card. This is a nice little device offering up to 850kbps today (presumably over vanilla EVDO) and up to 3.1Mbps when Sprint's Rev A network is switched on.

The interesting bit is that they've valued the mobility premium, which I've blogged about before. For $80/mth for 12 mos. you can get unlimited data usage. Comparing apples to apples here, a similar broadband DSL service would cost under $20 per month. And this is without any bundles. So let's say the mobility premium is 4x to keep the math simple.

Is mobility worth it? Well, clearly this card and tariff is an enterprise offering so a mobility premium of 4X doesn't seem unreasonable. But why doesn't the blasted card support WiFi??? Without WiFi, I think it's completely useless.