Finally got my Globe Visibility package yesterday, after dilly-dallying for almost a month. So far, it’s like a really, really good dream: you stick the iPod-nano-sized modem into the Mac’s USB port and presto! HSDPA speeds anywhere in the metropolitan Philippines.
This is one of the few devices that I’ve bought from a telco that I was quite happy with, end-to-end. Everything from the guest relations officer who helped me test it at the Rockwell Globe Hub, to the time to activation (a little less than 6 hours) was all quite impressive.
Thus far, I’ve only spent a total of 5 hours online with the modem (a Chinese-manufactured bit of kit called the Huawei E220) and have tried it at a McDonald’s in the Fort, and my condo in Eastwood. Both times I was really quite impressed by the performance.
To put some real numbers on it:
I was able to get some very decent download rates from my bittorrent client Xtorrent — about 60K/sec downstream and a very healthy 45K/sec upstream. (Bittorrent is a great, real-world way to benchmark a connection because it’ll give you a good idea of how other latency- and bandwidth-sensitive applications like Skype or iChat will fare, and it can max out your total bandwidth really quickly.) As a quick comparison, my PLDT MyDSL 768kbps subscription, which I was paying PhP995.00/mo for, could do roughly 70K/sec downstream and 35K/sec upstream.
So Globe Visibility isn’t what you would call a “DSL-killer” by an stretch of the imagination. It’s a niche product for people who really must have the ability to get online no matter where they are. Its price-point is also quite prohibitive: PhP2,000.00 to setup and PhP2,000.00/mo for two years. Getting a Visibility plan involves all the same hoop-jumping and rain-dancing as getting a postpaid mobile phone, so there’s a certain amount of hassle as well. It’s also not the solution if you are looking to get the fastest possible Internet connection, as it’s slower than even the slowest DSL plan. (It’s roughly equivalent to a 512mbps DSL connection, from what I’ve seen thus far. If you read the HSDPA specification though, it can supposedly handle speeds of up to 1.8mbps, although I have yet to see anywhere near that from my brief tests.)
However: if you’ve got the kind of job that requires you to be able to jump online at a moment’s notice (like say, if one of your web servers failed), then I think this is one of those rare occasions that I can recommend a really decent solution.