okay my girl just got a sony vaio and i told her she doesnt want to run around looking for a unsecured wifi connection so she goes out and gets the sprint sierra wireless compass 597 its a lil usb stick type deal and its advertised saying "speeds of 1.2 to 3.1 mbps" i thought yeah right so we get it and did a speed test and only get like 500 kbps for download and upload like 400 but in apps like utorrent im lucky to get 50 and downloading from http i get maybe 80...maybe now my ? is is it a location problem do i need to be closer to a tower i have 5 bars out of 6 (80%) but we experience slow speeds is there any way to tweak this modem to et better speeds or are we screwed any feedback would be greatly appreciated thanks by the way i have it connected to my desktop now

The speeds of torrents are variable so they aren't a valid test. If speedtest.net tells you you get 500kbps, that's 62.5KB/s download - remember speedtest tells you the speed of your connection in bits - additionally, the speeds of devices are also given in bits - so the speed your stick is actually quoting is 1.2-3.1Mbps, 150-388KB/s. For a wireless internet connection, that's very unrealistic, 60KB/s down is more like what I would expect to receive.

ah i see now.....oh well i guess we will give this piece of crap back and get some cable and a wireless router thanks for the help bro

It's a far more realistic situation. True Wireless broadband is usually only used for a PC to have internet on the move.

true true