It looks like the mobile data wars are starting to heat up, with Vodafone today dropping the price of their mobile broadband offerings.

For 20 bucks (or $19.95 for the pedantic among us) over 24 months, you get 1GB of data over Voda's 3G network, plus it will cost you $5 per month for the USB Internet stick. That price is $10 a month less than the previous offering.

If you're a data hound, you can get 5GB for $39.95 a month, with the USB modem included for free over 24 months. That's down $10 on previous pricing as well.

Considering Vodafone pops you on their 2.5G network when you run out of 3G (rather than charge you roaming fees on Telstra's network, a la 3), this is a pretty solid deal, and potentially the best offering on the market at the moment.

[Vodafone]

Researchers at Boston University (whose football mascot, incidentally, is a giant light-emitting germanium diode) think they'll be able to combine LED bulbs with wireless networking technology, allowing for nearly complete ubiquity of wireless access points. The technology will be able to communicate data with visible light at up to 10Mbps, and can be adapted to existing power lines.

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How do you make a wireless transmission that is as fast or even faster than most fiber-optic data passages? With laser beams of course! According to a Technology Review piece, super smart people at Battelle research in Columbus, OH figured out a way, using millimeter wave technology, to send data at speeds up to 20 gigabits per second. They even field tested 10 Gbps at up to 800 meters. Even accounting for Ohio's unnervingly flat terrain, this is several hundred times farther than a wireless transmission of that bandwidth had ever reached before.

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Yesterday, Telstra celebrated the second birthday of its NextG network by announcing that they are on track to deliver even faster speeds on the network. The Enhanced HSPA (eHSPA) network is theoretically capable of 21Mbps download speeds - which is significantly faster than any of the country's other HSPA networks (which typically max out at about 7Mbps theoretically).

When the Big T launches their eHSPA network (which it claims will happen by the end of the year), it will make them the first carrier to offer the 21Mbps speeds.

Of course, the only problem with this comes not from Telstra, but from the lack of compliant hardware on the consumer side. After all, NextG is already capable of speeds around 14.4Mbps, but there isn't a whole lot of handsets (or other devices) that take advantage of the speeds. It's why those claims of a 42Mbps iPhone were such crap - the chip inside the iPhone was only capable of 7.2Mbps.

Still, the hardware will come eventually, and although Telstra is certain to charge obscene amounts of cash for these types of speeds, it's still impressive that you'll be able to get lightning fast wireless connectivity all around Australia.

[Telstra]

Shockingly, AT&T has discovered that *gasp* people are abusing their unlimited pre-paid data service by tapping into it with their laptops. As a result, the plug is being pulled on the $US19.99/month option starting on November 12th. AT&T will also place a cap on the legitimate laptop DataConnect plan that works out to 5GB a month for $US60. Overages will be billed at $US0.00048 per kilobyte, which translates into a bank account-busting $US480 per gigabyte. However, rumours claim that AT&T will terminate service once a $US100 overage threshold has been reached. [PhoneNews via Engadget Mobile via MobileBurn]

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Whether people were holding out for 3G, the $US199 pricepoint or just for their damn contracts to run out, in a market where carriers are pretty much forced to steal customers from each other, the iPhone 3G has been a Batman-worthy thief. One out of three iPhone 3G buyers jumped from other carriers to AT&T, though it might surprise where they came from.

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We saw Sprint/Clearwire/whoever's Xohm WiMax tested in B-more with speedy results. And now, news from a Xohm employee in Baltimore is that the service is also live and working (albeit in an "unsupported" test capacity) in Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and northern Virginia. So anyone with WiMax-enabled hardware in those cities, let us know if you're picking up any sweet 3 mbps pipe out there. [MP3Car]

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D-Link announced a new router yesterday which sounds a lot like other flagship home routers that have already hit market: The $US200 DIR-825 is dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz N plus Gigabit ethernet. These are all great features, but the surprising one is that the USB port in the back uses a new protocol that lets networked PCs treat it as a local USB port, even if they're all the way across the house. The good news for your broke arse is, if you have one of several D-Link routers listed below, you can inject your router's USB port with the same virtual connectivity... for free.

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Our friend (and Wired editor) Nick Thompson wrote a piece in the Washington Monthly accusing John McCain for the sorry state of America's broadband. It seems the e-mail-avoiding presidential candidate, as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, supported too much consolidation and too little oversight. The end result? "Since 2000, the United States has gone from fifth in the world to twenty-second in broadband penetration."

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Laptopmag went ahead and tested out Xohm WiMax goodness, now that it's live in Baltimore. They jammed an ExpressCard Xohm into a Sony Vaio laptop, and compared it to a Kyocera EVDO card running on Verizon, at a spot where both signals were strong. The conclusion? Xohm beats EVDO for speed when doing intensive downloading, such as streaming video, or large file transfers—the top download speed they found for Xohm was 3.05Mbps while EVDO managed just 1.43MBps. So far so groovy, and Laptopmag gave a few more thumbs up to the system, like how it auto-connects when you plug in the adaptor, and the daily subscription options. But this isn't much of a surprise—it's designed to be faster—and for now Xohm's coverage is severely limited, to say the least. Check out the link for the full picture. [Laptopmag]

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