I just got Sprint’s new PC-5740 EVDO card for my laptop, which makes me very happy.  For those of you who don’t know, EVDO (EVolution Data Only) is broadband service provided by CDMA cellular companies such as Sprint or Verizon.  There are competing technologies out there from the GMS providers (T-Mobile, Cingular, etc), but they are lagging pretty far behind right now in the USA.  With my new EVDO card I am able to get my laptop online anywhere that I have a Sprint data connection, which is a much larger footprint than a series of WiFi base stations.  I’m online at pretty fast speeds, so all must be great, right?  WRONG!

Sprint has decided to use something called an image proxy server.  This server takes all of the images and HTML that gets sent to my EVDO card and compresses the heck out of them.  The benefit of an image proxy server is that all of the images get compressed before I even try to download them, so it’s really fast.  The downside is that my images look like poo.

Image compression on data connection cards is very common.  If you went out and purchased a Verizon data access card right now, you would get a program called Venturi which compresses the images on the fly.  The big difference here is that with Verizon I can shut off the image compression by shutting off Venturi.  With Sprint, while I do have image compression software with my card, the actual server I am connected to back at Sprint is also compressing the image and sending me only partial image information.  I can’t shut it off since it’s a Sprint server that I can’t control.

There are two workarounds:
1 – If you refresh your page the Sprint server will auto-send you the full image.  This is actually quite nice.  If 90% of the time you just need to browse as fast as possible but only 10% of the time you need the pretty graphics, then you’re just a button click away from getting the full quality pictures.  Honestly, this is quite elegant and for most users is exactly what they want.  I am not like most users.

2 – You can change the Agent type of your browser.  For some reason (I’m sure it’s $$ related) Sprint sends the full image to Blazer Browser which is built into the Treo 650.  If you tell your browser to announce to Sprint that it’s Blazer, then you will get the full images every time.  For instructions on how to change the agent type of Firefox, visit the EVDO Forums.  To change the user agent of Internet Explorer, you’ll need to be a bit techie.  I had to hack around a bit to make this work, but it seems to do the trick:
Open your Registry Editor (START->RUN regedit)
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent.
From here you’ll want to enter 3 new strings / values:
Compatible / compatible
Platform / Windows NT 5.0
Version / MSIE 5.5; Blazer/4.0
Using these two techniques will tell both Firefox and Internet Explorer to say to Sprint servers, “hey, I’m really Blazer, give me the full image”.  I know it’s a bit geeky, but it’s what works.  For 95% of the users out there I would say to stick with the first workaround and just refresh your browser when you want the full image.  Your Internet speed will be quite a bit faster, and you don’t have to hack around with your registry.

I have only had Sprint service for about 12 hours now, so I’m sure I’ll find more things that I do and don’t like.  I’m of the opinion that the user should have the choice to enable or disable compression.  Compression makes the service a lot faster, but it is not what I want!  So far I would take the Sprint service over Verizon service for a few reasons:  price, software and performance.  Sprint is quite a bit less expensive than Verizon, and they include much better connection software that goes with the card.  Verizon’s VZAccess software is a joke and should be completely re-written.  Sprint seems to have better connection speeds, at least for the time being.  You can see a nifty comparison of Sprint and Verizon speeds here. All I want is for Sprint to drop their image proxy server and work compression like Verizon.

We will continue to test Sprint’s EVDO coverage over the coming days and let you know how it goes.  Most of the users at Technology Evangelist have been using Verizon’s EVDO service since it first came out (which is a while ago, maybe a year?)  All of us will be comparing and contrasting the two services quite extensively.  Come back often to see how we fare.