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PLDT WeRoam

If you’ve been on the internet a few years back and happened to search for PLDT online, you might have run into one of the dozens of millions of billions of hate posts I’ve personally written.

With a passion, I still have the same resentments, except today, I’m going to throw them a little love.

Stopped by a PLDT business center today to pick-up my free WeRoam kit, if you have a DSL service of 2,000PHP+ above, you’re entitled to one too. You have two choices: the 799 plan or the Pay-per-surf plan, I got the latter since I’m not in real need of mobile connectivity anyway, this is explained in a bit.

I own two 3G-HSDPA capable phones, so it totally kills off the need for services like WeRoam, but I’m glad I got the kit when I did.. because it’s fantastic. The speed is unbelievable! My expectations of 3G internet providers in the Philippines dropped steeply when I tried out Globe 3G for mobile internet. As I have high standards for Globe (even through the poor connection speeds), they became the benchmark for everything else, in this case I’m glad I was wrong. The WeRoam network is actually…… powered by Smart 3G, so that’s really eye opening and at the same time confusing, because I have a friend who has the SmartBro 3G kit and as reported, it’s awful and unbearable to use through the frequent disconnections and turtling speed.

The kit came in a nice DVD-like case with a rebranded ZTE MF622 HSDPA modem which is outstanding as its technical specs mention that it can go up to staggering speeds of 7.2MBPS wireless, of course, we’ll be running on WeRoam speeds. It’s 2MBPS as advertised, but in reality, it’s running on the 1.8MBPS HSDPA deployment.. matters little though, I’m not complaining!

So how fast is it?

I’m able to YouTube, buffering for about five to ten seconds depending on the length and most of the time that’s enough to have the whole video play without interruption. All the while I’m surfing into random sites via StumbleUpon and browsing Facebook. If I could sum it up… as a regular internet connection… it’s not bad at all, but as a way to seldom connect to the internet on the go, it’s FANTASTIC. Please note that this is coming from me, a person with much hatred for anything PLDT.

For a change, they did not disappoint this time.

Just in case you do get your kit and you’re running a 64-bit version of Vista like me, grab the drivers from this page: http://www.zapp.ro/en/internet/modems/3g/mf622/ as the modem only includes ones for 32-bit XP and Vista.

Update: I’m able to do torrents through WeRoam with 60-80KBps speeds, that’s KBps or KB/s, mind you! This is while I’m surfing YouTube!!! AWESOME!