Review: Sprint Compass 597 USB mobile broadband modem

I'm on a bus heading to New York for a day of meetings, and while the on-bus wireless Internet access is fine, I'm using the three-or-so-hour bus ride to utilize the Sprint Compass 597 (made by Sierra Wireless) USB modem, which provides access to Sprint's Mobile Broadband network (EV-DO Rev. A). Here's a quick review in between the bumps and turns of the bus trip.

Sprint says the device is the "nation's smallest USB modem", and it's hard to argue with that. The USB stick is smaller than some USB flash drives I've seen, and fits nicely into the USB port of the notebook. For users with vertical USB slots, you can use the provided USB extension cable.

A really nice feature is that installation is handled just by inserting the device into the USB port. Gone is the associated CD-ROM and lengthy instructions, including those stickers that shout, "Make sure you install the software first before inserting the card/modem." After you insert the device, the software install doesn't require multiple button pushes, the program does most of the heavy lifting to get configured. On my Windows XP notebook, one restart was required, and there was a small moment when Windows said that "a problem had occurred", but that message went away when the entire program had finished its install.

The Compass 597 comes with Sprint SmartView software, which acts as the connection mechanism, but offers more features too. There's a GPS receiver in the USB device, and the software includes a button that allows access to different location-based offerings. This includes things like finding businesses closest to your location, finding the nearest restaurant, bank, hotel, coffee shop, etc. Conducting a GPS-based search opens a browser and brings you to the Microsoft Live Search Maps service. It's a cool app, although the satellite maps that show my hometown are outdated (the photos show a three-year-old mall still under construction). Sprint includes a "share" button that lets other third-party GPS applications to grab the location data from the device – very thoughtful.

An "applications" button on the software also can link you to Sprint support, coverage maps and a link to an "Internet speed test", which can give you a sense of how fast your download and upload speeds are. Using the Sprint service, I was getting an average of 1.054Mbps download speeds, and averaging 542.6Kbps of upload speeds, with an average latency of 102 ms. Using Toast.net's Internet speed test, the speeds were a bit slower, I averaged 966.4Kbps of download speed, and only 173.2Kbps of upload speeds. Still, getting close to a megabit-per-second is pretty awesome for a mobile broadband card. The "mobile" part of broadband was just as fast – while on a moving bus I did another round of speed tests, and with varying degrees of signal strength I was still able to get an average download speed of 846.2Kbps, an average upload speed of 622.6Kbps and average latency of 94.4 ms. When moving, wireless broadband tends to go to extremes, because of the potential of dead zones, blockage from tunnels and overpasses, etc.

The Compass 597 also includes a microSD card slot for data transfer, but this would only benefit mobile phone or smart phone users for transferring music, photos or other data to the PC. I'm not sure if a standard SD card would fit into the compact package, but that format would be more useful to me.

Finally, there's a VPN button that lets you connect quickly to your Microsoft or Cisco-enabled VPN client, I was able to add my VPN configuration to the software and connect to the corporate network. It was a nice touch on some already good software.

The Compass 597 costs $249.99, but with rebates and such the price drops down to a very affordable $49.99 (plus two-year agreement), and the Sprint data plan costs $59.99 per month with a 5GB per month data allowance (with 300MB limits for roaming). Companies that thought mobile broadband access was too expensive might consider taking a look at this device and the Sprint data plans.

As an end user, this experience was certainly the best I've had with mobile broadband, and if I could use this on all my trips, I'd have to stop worrying about trying to track down Wi-Fi hot spots.