From our good friend, Dvorak via Slashdot (btw, anyone notice /. labelled this "dubiousfacts"? Nice drive-by editorializing, there):

It's no coincidence that these commercials for EV-DO and others for plug-in cell phone network cards cropped up just at the same time the market got hit with a slew of Wi-Fi phones and Wi-Fi/cell combo phones. Wi-Fi needs to die! These phone companies are going to do everything they can to trash 802.11, especially 802.11n, which may eventually be as fast as 600 megabits per second.

Here's the value proposition. Wi-Fi is currently at 54 Mbps and has been for years. Reaching 100 Mbps is easily achievable thanks to pre-n and other tricks. The cell connections run from 384 Kbps with EDGE up to maybe 2 Mbps on EV-DO, if you're lucky. ...

For these speeds... you pay $50, $60, maybe $70 a month. And for that money, you get to send files from a park bench a couple of times a week or maybe once a month from the airport. Is the public so stupid that if given the choice between that service and free municipal Wi-Fi, they'd want the slower expensive service over the free faster service?

Here's the deal: Roads cost a lot of cash. Somehow, we'll still let the government build them with our tax dollars. They are commercially, militarily, and recreationally useful. So is WiFi. If people are serious about eDemocracy, WiFi (or some sort of unlicensed, unregulated wireless networking standard like 802.11[x] connecting to the Internet) will be made available to as many as is humanly possible.