Sprint offering $40 monthly mobile business data plan

Sprint is offering business users a wireless data program that gives them 500MB of monthly data for $39.99 a month.

Sprint is marketing the plan as a low-cost alternative for "moderate" data users whose mobile device services are billed directly to their companies. Customers who break past the 500MB monthly bandwidth cap will pay an extra five cents for each additional megabyte of data consumed.

Sprint says the plan is available for all devices in its mobile broadband portfolio, including Novatel's Wireless MiFi 2200 personal mobile hotspot. The MiFi is a device that essentially takes 3G signals from HSPA or EV-DO networks and converts them into Wi-Fi signals that can be used by any Wi-Fi capable device. This way, users can connect their Wi-Fi enabled laptops to the Internet anywhere they can get 3G signals. Sprint and Verizon are the only two major U.S. carriers to offer MiFi on their networks.

Sprint is also marketing two other mobile data plans for business users: a 3G connection plan that costs $59.99 per month and allows for 5GB of monthly data usage; and a 3G-4G connection plan that costs $79.99 a month and gives users access to Sprint's high-speed WiMAX services.

Sprint’s WiMAX services are available only in Baltimore, Md. and Portland, Ore. For 2009, Sprint plans to deploy services in Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Fort Worth, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Philadelphia and Seattle. In 2010 the company expects to launch WiMAX services in Boston, Houston, New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.