Subscribed July 2006.

I live in Queensrow, Molino, Bacoor, Cavite. Only had a few bouts of slow connection. But I do understand that the published speed they use in advertisements is in kilobits (kb) and not kilobytes (kB) (1 kilobyte = 8 kilobits). And the speed that you see in commercials and print ads is the maximum possible speed allowable. That means on average your connection may be much less than what you expect most of the time due to several factors: weather, distance from cellsite, surrounding enviroment (e.g. trees, mountains, buildings, structures that may prevent line-of-sight visibility from the base), equipment nearby that may be causing interference (such as power lines etc.), cookies (browser), network congestion, quality of equipment used by the provider, quality of customer premise equipment (the equipment that decodes the signal and feeds them to your PC), PC configuration, firewall settings, processor speed etc.

That is the situation so far in my area. I can’t speak for those in other areas who experience frequent disconnections. Now, that is another story. My last disconnection was three weeks ago and I received an sms text from smart announcing they’re conducting maintenance and that was it.

My advice is always delete cookies from time to time and restart your browser. Make sure your firewall is configured properly for your browser. Defragment your hard disk once a month. Scan your hard disk for spyware (they will slow down your system to a screeching halt) once a week. Some good anti-spyware software are spybot, spywareblaster, adaware (all these are free to download). Or if you have windows xp service pack 2 you can utilize Microsoft’s Windows Defender.

I kinda know all these because I was tech support before for a well known US broadband provider. Last year they were already offering 1.5Mbps (26x faster than dial-up) for almost same price we’re paying. I just hope our folks from Globe or Smart can catch up.

Popularity: 2% [?]