evan.musing << current

Since I’m with working for EY (Engine Yard) there is no office, I’ll be working from home solely. Problem with working from home is that you’re home all the time, and I tend to go a bit crazy if I stay home all day. So I ponyed up and got a new Sprint EVDO account, so I can work from where ever!

The device I got is the Sierra Wireless AC 595U, which is USB. It’s pretty nice because the connector is at a 90 angle from the rest of the device, so it stands straight up, rather than straight out like a lot of them. Straight out is a pain because the footprint of your laptop grows by like 6 inches by having it in. This one barely sticks out any more than the Powerbook power connector, which is great.

Performance

The speed isn’t awesome (saw it at 100kb/s burst upload though), but from what I’ve seen, it’s faster in LA (which is where I’ll be using it from mostly). I’ll be sure to run the speedtest again when I get there.

OS X Compatible:

This turned out way better than I’d hoped for. Sierra Wireless has ported their connection manager to OS X in total, so I could actually activate and provision the card under OS X. Most reports of using EVDO on OS X talks about needing a Windows machine to provision and activate, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear that wasn’t the case here.
It just shows up as a modem to OS X, but Sierra’s software reports extra stats like what speed networks are available (1xRRT, EVDOr0, or EVDOrA). Right now, sitting just north of Lake Union in Seattle, I’ve got 3 bars of strength and EVDOrA (the fastest).

To play with:

The box says that it’s got some kind of GPS capability too. I’m suspecting it’s the newish ground based GPS (same thing Helio uses), so I’ll have to see how I can query the modem for coordinates or something.