Virgin UK gearing up for laptop data in fourth quarter

Apparently feeling a little celebratory after negotiating lower wholesale rates for voice and data, British MVNO Virgin Mobile has said that it intends to start offering broadband data cards some time in the fourth quarter of the year. In the UK, Virgin operates on top of T-Mobile's wireless backbone, so customers of the new data service should have a pretty nice HSDPA footprint with which to work -- a totally upside-down version of the US picture, where Virgin uses Sprint, offers no data cards (hell, they barely admit the existence of data on their handsets), and rocks CDMA to the core. Weird how the world works sometimes.