Virgin Mobile to offer wireless broadband

Cricket won’t be the only prepaid player in the mobile broadband game. While their $40/month offering stands alone for now, word has circulated that Virgin Mobile will begin offering mobile broadband in June. This comes from a Best Buy inventory screenshot, so obviously it will launch through there. Whether it is an exclusive or not is unknown. After the jump, details on the modem and plan pricing. While there’s no word on the modem manufacturer, we do know that the price is $149.99. That’s expensive for a broadband modem, but it’s also unsubsidized. It will work on Virgin’s EVDO network, and should have signal strength comparable to Sprint, which according to Gizmodo is the top mobile broadband service among the three major U.S. providers. Then there’s the pricing scheme. It sounds like there will be two options, one for prepaid and one for postpaid. Postpaid sounds a lot better, at $40 per month for 5GB of data, or 1GB for a yet-unknown price. On the prepaid end it will be $20 per 250MB of data, sold via Virgin’s top-up cards. While that’s not an attractive rate in general, it does allow for light usage (i.e., email) while sporadically on the road. It’s looking like a mid-June launch for this service, so we’ll keep our eyes peeled for the announcement, the model of the broadband card, and the pricing on the 1GB plan. ]]>