There is a satellite station for the LTE booth located near my hotel. I heard that they degraded the signal to “divert all power” to the central booths where Rico Blanco performed. I got a bright idea. I decided to do a real speed test. What would happen if we had a degraded LTE signal (without shifting to HSPA) trying to go through several layers of concrete? I was at the Real Maris Hotel. The center stage is located near Aria in D’Mall fronting the beach. That’s relatively far PLUS the fact that my hotel room is located near the road. At the booth I am guaranteed over 50Mbps — that’s about 6 MEGABYTES per second. But in the real world, I don’t think this will hold true given location of you in conjunction to the cell sites and the number of users accessing the signal.
Also, what if we were pinging servers from the USA? Here’s a screenshot of what kind of speeds you are getting if your server is located in Washington and the sites you are accessing from the PH are not cached OR not being downloaded from a dedicated server.
So I ran back to my room, skipped a massage (haynaku), fired up my ScreenFlow and spent the next 30 minutes making this actual speed test. I promised myself that I would post whatever findings I had here — good or bad.
If you’re interested in diving and photography, NUDI Night is probably something you can add to your list of to do’s. Although we’re mostly divers, we also have non-diver friends join us for our monthly meetup. If you’ve always been curious about SCUBA and have been wanting to try it out, this is a good venue to get together and meet the community of divers, instructors, dive masters and their non-diver friends. 🙂
So, if your Tuesday evening is still free, do drop by! There’s a small charge of PHP 500.00 to cover for food, beer and the venue.
When: Tuesday, February 22 · 7:00pm – 10:00pm Where: Unit 217 (Closed Pavilion) 2nd Flr. LRI Design Plaza 210 N. Garcia St. (formerly Reposo St.), Bel-Air II Makati, Philippines
I was floored when I got a call from C&G asking if I would like to take part in promoting this event. I’ve seen him work his magic on the Internet but it will be quite different when you see it in person.
So here’s the deal. I have two extra tickets to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth this coming June 8 2010. See him live. Listen to him talk about global warming. Maybe have a photo with him. Post it on Facebook. Get comments.
June 8 2010
SM Mall of Asia
4:00 PM
(Remember that June 8 is a weekday!)
These tickets are expensive, so I’m giving these away to two individuals who can do the following:
Leave a reaction. Leave many more. The two people with the best insight and can converse with me there win. Also make sure you leave a valid name and email address or contact number.
Yes, I know the “best” is relative. But so are the tickets. They’re relatively expensive. If comments don’t get approved quickly, please be patient as I am usually out during the day.
I’ll close the conversation before midnight, this Monday, 11:59 PM May 24 2010.
I don’t understand the hype behind these speed tests.
SMART, Globe, SUN … does it really matter who claims to be the fastest? Based on studies, Globe claims to be the fastest but everyone else says it isn’t so. SMART fluctuates as well. SUN is the “fastest” and also the “slowest.”
So… what now?
For me it’s really simple. Buy the mobile broadband of choice that has relatively OK coverage where you frequent. The reason why I use SMARTBro is because it’s more effective in non-Ayala properties (this is a personal observation so it might be different with you). If you go to an Ayala Mall anyway, there will always be a free WiFi coffee shop around the corner so it negates the need for a dongle. Besides, lots of malls have free WiFi anyway.
To summarize: SMARTBro = better outside malls. Inside malls = use free WiFi. Cebu = SMARTBro. Davao = Are you kidding?! There’s free WiFi on the streets!!!