Tuesday, February 13, 2007 Limpag: Fast mobile Internet access as we roam By Max Limpag Celltalk
FAST MOBILE. I attended a demo on PLDT WeRoam and Smart’s HSDPA service last week and came out impressed. Two things struck me during the demo: the speed of the service and its consistency.
Before I write more, let me just point out that I’ve been working with horrendously slow Globelines Broadband service at home these past weeks (it’s better now; I’m crossing my fingers it stays this way) that I’m easily impressed with any service that’s reasonably fast and consistent with its speed.
Globe Visibility was fast during a short demo I attended on the run-up to the Sinulog. PLDT WeRoam with HSDPA is faster. Both companies, in conducting the demo, chose the venue. They chose, I assume, a site that has reasonably strong HSDPA coverage. The difference is, I’ve been able to use PLDT WeRoam (my wife was assigned one account by her office) in several locations and I find its speed consistent.
During the demo, Globe clocked 500 plus kbps using their in-house speed monitor. PLDT WeRoam logged double that speed in a third-party test site (Speakeasy.net) during last week’s demo and in several times
I’ve been using it. In fact, I just checked its speed as I write this inside the Sun.Star Cebu newsroom and it registered a download speed of 1225kbps. I do not know how wide the HSDPA coverage of Globe is but a member of its tech staff said he got consistent HSDPA access from the airport to his hotel in Mabolo to the demo site near Waterfront Lahug. PLDT and Smart officials said during the demo they have metro-wide coverage in the cities of Lapu-Lapu, Mandaue, Cebu, and Talisay.
Joseph Versoza, business head of the PLDT Corporate Business Group, also said PLDT WeRoam does a seamless handover of Internet connection. What this means is that if HSDPA is not available, WeRoam tries to useother connection protocols like GPRS and EDGE without cutting your Internet session. You don’t have to reconnect every time HSDPA connection is cut and when its restored, the connection manager automatically uses the faster connection.
PLDT WeRoam is also cheaper. Its unlimited EDGE/GPRS plan costs just P1,200 a month while its unlimited EDGE/GPRS and HSDPA plan costs just P1,700 a month. To enroll, you just need to pay one month in advance and a one-time fee of P2,500. You need to pay a higher enrollment fee if you want to buy the card. But if I were you, I’d sign up for the HSDPA plan, the P500 difference is nothing compared to the boost in Internet connection speed.
Globe Visibility, on the other hand, costs P2,000 a month. I was told during the demo that you need to pay only one month in advance to sign up but a colleague who called up Globe was told you also need to pay an added P2,000 one-time fee.
MOBILE TV. But what’s really exciting about HSDPA connectivity is the improved mobile TV experience. I watched Eat Bulaga live (see photo) on an HSDPA handset and the streaming of the video was flawless. The video wasn’t jerky and it didn’t stop playing to buffer content. Heck, the video streaming was even better than my experience in viewing YouTube videos in my PC at home during the weeks when Globelines Broadband’s service deteriorated because of the Taiwan quake.
I checked with Smart’s website and it said that they charge P20 per day as “daily channel fee” and P5 per viewing of recent episodes. Not many people would watch regular TV, the Kapamilya vs. Kapuso programming as we know it today, on the cell phone. But the service will be helpful for people on the go who want to catch up on the latest news broadcast or recent episodes of their favorite shows. But many people, I’m sure, will watch a new made-for-mobile screen “TV” programming. This will open the way for independent “filmmakers” and the next generation of visual storytellers and journalists to build up an audience online and create their own mobile channel.
