Abstract. We characterize exactly the compactness properties of the product of κ copies of the space ω with the discrete topology. The characterization involves uniform ultrafilters, infinitary languages, and the existence of nonstandard elements in elementary estensions. We also have results involving products of possibly uncountable regular cardinals.Mycielski [My], extending previous results by Ehrenfeucht, Erdös, Hajnal, Loś and Stone, showed that ω κ is not (finally) κ-compact, for every infinite cardinal κ strictly less than the first weakly inaccessible cardinal. Here ω denotes a countable topological space with the discrete topology; products (and powers) are endowed with the Tychonoff topology, and a topological space is said to be finally κ-compact if any open cover has a subcover of cardinality strictly less than κ.On the other direction, Mrówka [Mr1,Mr2] showed that if L ω 1 ,ω is pκ, κq-compact, then ω κ is indeed finally κ-compact (in particular, this holds if κ is weakly compact). As usual, L λ,µ is the infinitary language which allows conjunctions and disjunctions of ă λ formulas, and universal or existential quantification over ă µ variables; pκ, κq-compactness means that any κ-satisfiable set of |κ|-many sentences is satisfiable.To the best of our knowledge, the gap between Mycielski's and Mrówka's results has never been exactly filled. It follows from [Mr2, Theorem 1] anď Cudnovskiȋ [Ču, Theorem 2] that L κ,ω is pκ, κq-compact if and only if every product of |κ|-many discrete spaces, each of cardinality ă κ, is finally κ-compact (the proofs build also on work by Hanf, Keisler, Monk, Scott, Tarski, Ulam and others; earlier versions and variants were known under inaccessibility conditions). No matter how satisfying the above result is, it adds nothing about powers of ω, since it deals with possibly uncountable factors.In this note we show that Mrówka gives the exact estimation, namely, that ω κ is finally κ-compact if and only if L ω 1 ,ω is pκ, κq-compact. More 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 54B10, 54D20, 03C75; Secondary 03C20, 03E05, 54A20, 54A25.