Thinkpads Forum

The federal government does not allow the EVDO wireless radios to be user replacable. Thus, because you might want to switch providers or because EVDO is undergoing a technology upgrade from EVDO Rev 0 to EVDO Rev A which uses a different chipset and is therefore not firmware upgradable, it is better to purchase PCMCIA cards instead of the built-in units. That is what many major customers are doing.

www.evdoinfo.com has a lot of info on EVDO including cheaper cards than you can purchase from Verizon and Sprint.

A problem is that although Sprint offers EVDO Rev A cards for the past two months, Verizon does not offer anything in an EVDO Rev A yet and they will not tell when they will have it available.

How does the government prevent them from being replaced by users?

Well, there may be some disadvantages, but I'd much rather have the internal than having a card sticking 1" out the side of my computer.
The FCC probably relates it to changing the card in your cell phone, but there really is no one stoping you from replacing it if you can get the actual card on ebay or whatever.

RUSH2112 wrote: The FCC probably relates it to changing the card in your cell phone, but there really is no one stoping you from replacing it if you can get the actual card on ebay or whatever.

True enough. I have heard that Verizon EVDO Rev A built-in cards (the next version) will be available soon.