A trend in 3D mesh compression is codec design with low computational complexity which preserves the input vertex and face order. However, this added information increases the complexity. We present a fast 3D mesh compression method that compresses the redundant shared vertex information between neighboring faces using simple first-order differential coding followed by fast entropy coding with a fixed length prefix. Our algorithm is feasible for low complexity designs and maintains the order, which is now part of the MPEG-4 scalable complexity 3D mesh compression standard. The proposed algorithm is 30 times faster than MPEG-4 3D mesh coding extension.