I’m in Aspen right now with my fiancee, doing our final wedding planning. We’re staying at the Hotel Jerome, home of the world famous J-Bar. We’re not facing the mountain so the view from the back window isn’t as spectacular as we’d hoped.

I’m doing this blog post over a mobile broadband technology called Evolution-Data Optimized (EV-DO), which is a wireless radio broadband standard that has been adopted by most major mobile phone service providers in the United States. It came pre-installed on my new laptop (more on that later) and I just hooked it up this morning.

The setup was easy. I had an aborted attempt yesterday while we were driving, but I think it was lack of solid cell service at the time I was setting it up. On the setup utility, there’s a cell strength indicator that was completely blank; once I got to Aspen and tried again it showed signal strength, indicating I hadn’t had any on the road.

Dell offers EV-DO with all their new XPS laptops; you just have to tell them which provider you want to use. I selected Verizion because I’m a current Verizon customer. However, I don’t believe that’s actually a requirement, at least I haven’t had to hook it up to my current cell service yet. Had I known that, I may have selected Sprint which has the widest EV-DO coverage of any network so far.

When I ran the connection utility, it connected me to a Verizon web page that prompted me for a credit card, even though I selected the free three-day trial. Speaking of credit cards, here’s the bad part. It costs $60/month or $15/day. I plan on using the daily option because many hotels have free wireless now. I’m also uncertain whether EV-DO will work on the road, which is mainly where I’d want it. They advertise it working in “major metropolitan areas” and “airports” which is nice, but I can usually track down free Wi-Fi in those locations.

We’ll be driving into Denver on Thursday and will try to use it on the road. I’ll do an update and let you know how it goes. For now, I’m sitting in my hotel room, impressed. I have a couple movies downloading in the background at 80 KBps and I’m alternately surfing, uploading photos, and writing this blog entry at the same time. I have 1MB cable modem at home and EV-DO isn’t that that fast. But it’s certainly as fast as the DSL lines I’ve used. Very impressive.

UPDATED 3/30

We did the drive from Aspen to Denver yesterday. We had excellent coverage the entire way, except for the canyons just east of Glenwood Springs. Its 70 Kbs speed has also been faster than both of the hotels I’ve stayed at on this trip (30-50 Kbs). So right now, I’m two thumbs up on Verizon EV-DO.

UPDATED 4/9

Unfortunately after arriving in Denver my experience with EV-DO took a turn for the worse. I feel that I have to retract this review as Verizon has been unable to turn on EV-DO now that my three-day trial is finished. You can read my updated review here.