I purchased a Smart Bro Prepaid Internet Kit last Monday. The price of the unit has gone down to Php1995 from the previous price of Php2500. Here’s a picture of the USB modem of Smart Bro Prepaid place side by side with some flash disks:
Smart Bro Prepaid USB Modem
It’s suppose to provide a maximum speed of 2Mbps using 3G. At the Smart Wireless Center in Gateway, the connection that I have was 400+kbps for downstream and around 200+ kbps for upstream, which is not bad.
After using it for several nights, here are my observations about the Smart Bro Prepaid.
The good points:
- The USB modem is handy. It’s small compare to the ones of Globe and Sun. I hope they included a lace for you to hang it on your neck.
- Smart is the no. 1 wireless broadband provider and no. 1 cellular phone network in the Philippines which can be both an advantage and disadvantage.
But here are the bad points:
- Here in Tondo, the speed sucks! I failed to get any 3G/HSDPA signal! Why I got was just GPRS/EDGE signal! And guess what’s my speed.
That’s as slow as dial-up!!! The PLDT MyDSL Plan 990 that I have managed to have a speed of
It seems Smart 3G signal is weak in my area. If you live in Tondo, Smart Bro is not a good choice. Globe and Sun are better. - To reload Smart Bro, you can either do it via AutoLoad or via Smart Bro regular load. Autoload for me is not good because you have to go to the hassle of reloading every 2-3 days since the load will just last that long. Smart Bro regular load is good but you need to use a Smart call sim to reload. Smart move from Smart, since this will force people to purchase a Smart sim. You can’t load from the Smart Bro sim since outgoing calls are barred. I wish Smart will be just like Globe where you can place the Globe Broadband sim in a phone and use it to reload.
- The charging is per 30 minutes, which means if you consumed 5 mins, you will be charged 30 mins which is Php10. The charging mechanism of Globe is better because it is per 15 mins.
For now, I plan to just dump my Smart Bro. Anyone interested can contact me and I can sell it to him/her at a lower price. Just make sure you already have a Smart call sim (for reloading) and a good Smart 3G signal in the area that you plan to use it.
