Review by eepmatt 
Posted: 1.8 years ago
member for 2.9 years, 5 visits, last login: 57 days ago
 Los Angeles,Los Angeles,CA
 $48 per month (48 month contract)
 about 1 days
 "Fast in Los Angeles. Surprisingly simple on my MacBook"
 "Slow in NYC. 2 year contract is a major negative"
 "Ok with caveats. Test drive for yourself... you have 30 days."
| Pre Sales Information:
Install process:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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I tested out Sprint’s wireless data service for my laptop over the last three weeks. I live in Los Angeles, and am in New York for a couple of months for work. I didn’t want to pay $14.95/night for the hotel’s Internet service, so Sprint seemed like a great option.
The signup process was easy. I bought the Sierra Wireless USB modem (595U) from my local Sprint store. I selected this one because I’m on a Macintosh, and it was the only device they had that supported Mac. It cost $329, less the $120 activation credit, less the $50 main in rebate. Total cost around $159.
The Sprint rep at the store told me that although the modem supported Mac, it had to be configured initially on a PC. He offered to do it for me in-store, but I would have to come back later because my new account needed 2-4 hours to get provisioned before he could setup the modem. I opted to take it home and try setting it up with Virtual PC.
I was able to activate the modem using the PC wizard on Virtual PC, but when it came time to update the modem’s firmware and PRL, Virtual PC kept crashing. I guess that’s not unexpected.
The next day I took it back to the Sprint store, and they had it updated within 20 minutes, using one of their PCs. As it turns out, I probably didn’t need to do this… it appears they have just released new software for the Mac. It will definitely activate the modem, but I do not know however if the Mac version of the software will update the firmware… the instructions are unclear on that.
Anyway, when I plugged in the modem and tried to connect with the app I had downloaded from Sprint’s website (it must be downloaded: it is not included on the disk in the package), the modem kept reporting errors and refused to connect. I repaired my disk’s permissions; Disk Utility found multiple permission errors on the modem scripts I had just installed. After that fix, it worked like a charm.
Connecting to the Internet is easy… you can use the Internet Connect utility built into Mac OS X, or the Sierra Wireless Watcher Lite program (downloaded free from sprint.com). The nice thing about the program is that it indicates signal strength, whether you’re connected to EVDO, EVDO-A, or 1xRTT. It also tells you how long you’ve been connected, and how much data you have sent or received.
The modem itself is about 2.5” by 1” by .5” thick. You can either plug it directly into a USB port, or it has a docking station and cable, so it can sit away from your computer also.
Before I left for New York, I tested the modem in a handful of places in Los Angeles. All locations reported EVDO-A. In the fastest two test sites, the Rx speed clocked in at around 2000kbs. The RX speed was 750kbps one location, 505kbps the other. The other locations were slower, but still very useable. In one location the modem reported only one bar of signal strength, but got speeds comparable to slow DSL. At LAX performance was worse: despite full reception, I got speeds around 350kbps down, 250 kbps up. I guess there is a lot of usage at LAX. A nice surprise was my hotel room in the outskirts of Palm Springs: EVDO-A with slow DSL speed connections. The rep at the Sprint store said the speed can range up to 8Mbps, but I never saw anything close to that.
My home turned out to be the most problematic location, though. Despite the fact that I live in the Hollywood Hills (notorious for bad cell reception), my Sprint phone always reports full reception there, and I have no trouble with data services on my phone. The modem was another story. Over the course of a week the modem never achieved a successful connection to the data service. Sprint tech support was stumped. The woman helping me at one point had me remove all account information from my Internet connection setup. I was pretty sure she didn’t know what she was doing, and expected this to screw up the modem completely. I was completely surprised though that when I next used the modem, it automatically repopulated the username and password fields with the correct settings! It’s preprogrammed to protect against user stupidity!!!
In the end, Sprint never was able to figure out why I could not connect at home. They kept saying the tower was reporting itself operable with no trouble. All they could do was initiate a trouble ticket. A week later, when I left for New York, the problem had still not been fixed.
The modem’s speed in New York, on Manhattan, was very disappointing. I tested it in about 7 different locations, and never got speeds faster than around 300kbps. I was really expected that the EVDO-A network in someplace as densely populated as NYC would be really really fast. It wasn’t.
I will say this though: every place the modem connected, it worked without stalls or major lags in loading pages. I never tried anything but surfing, but it was never interrupted by slowdowns of any sort.
Sprint’s unlimited data plan cost me $59.99/month. With my business discount (Sprint offers discounts for employees of many different companies) it comes in at about $47/month. The real suck thing about it is you have to sign a 2-year contract. Period. No discussion, no exceptions. My plan was to cancel after my travel is over, and the discounts I got on the modem and the rebate will just about offset the $200 early termination fee. But I think Sprint is really missing out though, because if they allowed me to turn it off and on I would never travel without it! (A side note: you can “suspend” the service for $5/mo, but when you unsuspend it you have to renew your two-year agreement, and suspended service does not count towards your two-year commitment.)
Overall, aside from the two-year term, and their inability to quickly locate and fix the problem with the tower that serves my home, I was quite happy in Los Angeles, satisfied though not wow-ed in NY, and extremely pleasantly surprised about how seamlessly it worked with my Mac. The lack of connectivity at home does show that things could go wrong and Sprint may not necessarily be able to pinpoint the problem quickly, much less resolve it. As much as I’m paying for the service, that’s frustrating.
In the end, I canceled the service within 30 days for a full refund. My hotel room ended up coming with free internet, so it wasn’t an issue. If it didn’t, though, a better solution for me would have been to share my Treo’s Vision connection over Bluetooth, bump up my data plan while I was away, and just deal with phone calls being bumped to voicemail by the data usage. (Why does data have priority over voice calls anyway? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?) The modem, for me, was just too expensive for the performance it provided.
Followup comments:  ydoucare
join:2003-03-12
Rensselaer, IN
1 edit | lol The Sprint rep you talked to must've been on crack. Downstream for EVDO Rev A is only spec'd at 3.1 mb/s max, regardless of the tower's backhaul. | |
| 
Fiber Man
@aol.com | Millenicom Check out this company. They actually use Sprint's network but only charge $49.99 for unlimited use with no contract at all. »millenicom.com/ | |
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