This card is supported by Cisco’s 1841, 1861, 2800-series and 3800-series ISR routers. This card only supports High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) “up to” 3.6 Mb/s downlink, 384 kb/s uplink (presumably HSDPA Category 5/6, but not sure)
“3G” is a broad category of standards and services around “broadband” mobile wireless voice and data. Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is part of this family. High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) is a collection of mobile telephony protocols that extend and improve the performance of existing UMTS protocols. Two standards, HSDPA and HSUPA have been established and is fairly well known.
Three components are required to use a 3G data connection: a SIM, a radio modem, and a router. The SIM identifies the subscriber (that is you the human) for billing and so forth. The radio modem does the hard work in providing physical layer (Layer1) access to the local 3G base station. The router typically uses PPP as the Layer2 data link to the provider’s Network Access Server (NAS), and from there is connected to the provider’s Layer3 network (which may be a private VPN, or public Internet).