I recently purchased a Sun prepaid broadband kit due to the new Php 50 1-day unlimited load offering this January. I thought their promo was over since it was valid only till the end of 2009.
Went to Robinson's Galleria and asked if my area was covered in Country Homes Cainta. So the rep checked out their map on a laptop (which is available only to them), and found out we are near a cell site with 3.5g. With that news, I agreed to purchase one. Then after paying the rep brought out the kit but asked if I have my laptop and If I want to activate it. Since the kit comes with a free 24 hr unlimited load. I said I don't have one and the rep still asked if I want to have it activated on the store. I thought that my time credit would be wasted as soon as she activates it since I had to go home and not sure if I can use my PC immediately so I said I will activate it myself since it looked like the same as my Smart Bro. The rep said the ask all who purchase the kit because they have encountered users cannot initialize the kit.
I went home anyways without them activating it and took my chances. That info made me think twice about my purchase, but I thought, my area was just almost a stones throw away from the cell site, how bad can it be? Plus there are news that my neigbors who uses Sun had some stable connection.
Setting it up, I thought hard when I would start using my free hours since I thought its 24 hrs unlimited, better find a nice time to maximize it. But I want to try it out immediately so I just started. That was around 8pm, when I checked my balance, I was expecting of my limit would be 8pm the next day. The text message said my load was for the next day but not time. I found out it ended 11:59 of the next day.
For the connection. I'm not going to go technical on this but just from user experience. It started out same as my Smart Bro prepaid. It was fast if your checking websites and email, but our test basis is usually Farmville which my wife loves playing. The loading time was longer than Smart. Other flash or media heavy sites are slower too on Sun. But it still does the job and with unlimited 1 day for P50, it seems to balance itself out, compared to Sun's P60 that will expire out in a few hours.
I tried it in my office in Libis Eastwood area. As I remember, there was a signal on the map but a little further compare to my house. It still worked but a little slower. Around the afternoon it was lagging really bad as I presume that internet traffic was increasing after work.
Next issue is buying the actual P50 unlimited load card which was very difficult to find in regular outlets. It seems like you can only buy it at Sun outlets only, as I went to load stores with posters of the unli card didn't have them either. So I lined up in Sun Robinson's East Mall and had to endure the line (they always have a slow line on Sun outlets), I bought 3 cards. Then went home to load them up. Compared to the free hours from the kit, the card load gives you exact 24 hr time.
It seems at around 7pm the connection looks stable but using torrent became irritating. During the first time, I had magnificent download speed, but now, I have 0 bitrate downloading no matter how I change my download limit.
Let's see with in a month if this will make me happy.
Conclusion:
Sun vs Smart vs Globe prepaid broadband in Cainta Junction area:
SMART: for general connection
SUN: for pricing / value
GLOBE: still a loser in my area. Nothing opens.
UPDATE (01-18-10): To my surprise, even with good line of sight with the source, my Sun Broadband Wireless Prepaid was very slow during the daytime and not much improvement at night especially at weekends and holidays. Did all of the sudden all of the people in my area bought SBW? At par with Globe prepaid's slowness. At start, I used to have torrent download and now even with 5kbps of limit, nothing comes out.
It is still in second place due to the P50 unlimited/day. Its great if you're just checking emails and websites but not for resource heavy sites. Or IM all day.
