What’s up with my SmartBro prepaid WiFi account?

Well, I am not as happy as I was then when I purchased my SmartBro prepaid WiFi kit. Why so? While the speed was OK when we tested it in the mall where I bought the kit, it was definitely a let-down when I accessed the internet here at home. Imagine having connection speed that averages at 1kbps?!! And I thought it should have been 384kbps at most. You bet I was one unhappy subscriber that time. Anyway, as I tried using this service while on the go, I found out that the connection speed really depends on your location.

When starting up your SmartBro connection, check out the signal strength indicator (the icon with the transmitter) with the vertical bars which tell you how strong is the signal reception. Beside the icon is displayed the available network where you are located – GSM (2G), GPRS (2.5G), and HSDPA (3G). On the bottom part of the window is displayed the transport rate which changes every second (from high to low data rates). On low signal days, I got a ‘Limited Service’ on my network availability. Ugh.

I have used the SmartBro prepaid kit within these areas:
Location: Talisay city, Negros Occidental – GSM (with average transport speed at 0kbps, forget about connecting to the Internet with this)
Location: Bacolod-Silay airport, Negros Occidental – GPRS (average transport speed at 2kbps, can connect to Yahoo! Messenger and can surf with very slow connection)
Location: Domestic airport, Manila – GPRS (average transport speed at 5kbps, still slow but I was able to access my Yahoo! Mail and send an attachment while chatting on Yahoo! Messenger and surfing on some sites)
Location: San Dionisio, Paranaque – 3G (average transport speed at 25kbps, fast connection to all sites, no complaints from me on this!)

24.77kbps transport rate within a 3G network (at the living room)

While the SmartBro prepaid WiFi service is not as fast as expected and advertised (thanks to  the media hype from big stars), it still helped me with connecting to the Internet via my laptop instead of going to an Internet café which meant risking my passwords and other personal information when going online in a public location. And since I am travelling more these days, it helped with accessing my online accounts at domestic airports where no WiFi hotspots are available.