My first thought when I saw Telstra’s new Elite mobile broadband card: “Wow, Expresscard isn’t dead yet?” My second thought: “Really? It isn’t dead yet?” My third thought: “Come on, surely it’s dead and this is a joke.” My fourth thought: “Okay, this joke was kinda lame to begin with, but now it’s just plain embarrassing.”
On a more serious note, the Elite card is one of the first to offer quad-band 3G, meaning it’ll jump on pretty much any 3G/HSPA network in the world. It supports 850MHz, 900MHz, 1800MHz and 2100MHz, as well as most Windows and Mac operating systems. Download speeds are a theoretical 8Mbps 21Mbps, but likely to cap at about 3Mbps 8Mbps.
Of course, being Telstra, it’s kind of expensive. It’ll cost $399 outright or free upfront on a $69 data plan or higher over 24 months. And because it’s targeted towards business users, it won’t offer throttled data when you exceed your monthly limit, instead costing anywhere between 5c and 25c per MB, depending on your data pack.
But seriously: Expresscard? (Okay, so Telstra tells me there’s a lot of demand for Expresscard. Who would have thought?)