When I first saw the Huawei E353 HSPA+ USB dongle a couple of weeks ago, I immediately asked our contacts close to the company if there are available open-line units of this model and was told it was directly imported from China by the telcos.
The Smart Bro Rocket Plug-It is a Huawei E353 modem.
One cannot get it unless you order by the hundreds and the price that is being offered by the telcos are already subsidized. I was surprised that to learn that the Php4k price is already below the street price.
An external port which looks like a plug for external antenna.
It turns out this model was only commercially launched in China last August 4 (per Huawei’s release). Online stores started carrying the modem with a retail price of $156 or close to Php6,700 a piece (one site was doing a limited promo price of $99 or Php4,200). I did not realize that dongle is that expensive.
Support for microSD card up to 32GB.
The modem supports HSPA+ (900/2100MHz bands), HSUPA, HSDPA, HSPA, UMTS (WCDMA) and GSM/EDGE networks and can have a theoretical downlink speed of 21.1Mbps and uplink speed of 5.76Mbps.
Huawei also claims it’s got the fastest connection time of under 15 seconds (from plug to live signal connection) which is actually true based on my initial tests (the old dongles takes a while to activate after you plug them in).
I’m sure we’ll be seeing openline HSPA+ dongles in the next few months but I bet they’ll be pretty expensive (like Php7.5k a pop expensive). Or we might as well get that Huawei E365 HSPA+ MyFi I saw in CommunicAsia back in June.
It’s actually a nice and useful piece of information. I am glad that you shared this useful info with us. Please keep us up to date like this. Thank you for sharing.
Yuga, please check my download rate using my Huawei E353
Dashboard using Tata Docomo (i regret coz i cant reach 12mbps using this dashboard)
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6038/6316357165_effa110a7f_b.jpg
this is my previous dashboard — graham inggs custom iso. check the speed.
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6044/6260588992_3a9e0a012f_b.jpg
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6039/6317086521_3826f38fcc_b.jpg
MAGKANO KAYA YAN KAPAG MAY KASAMANG ANTENNA ? ? ? MAS OK KASI QNG MAY ANTENNA NA KASAMA DIBA?? . . .
I bought mine here for 2700 shipping is already included
http://www.tipidpc.com/viewitem.php?iid=12220697&page=
I bought mine for 2.8k here:
http://tipidpc.com/viewitem.php?iid=11336372
I bought one today – waste of money. I get the HSPA+ signal, but the cell site is still badly overloaded. It’s the same experience as I have with the older Smart USB sticks – too many customer on the site/ system and not enough bandwidth to go around. At 9PM, it didn’t work at all – most sites just didn’t load or timed out. No one needs to pay P3995 for that.
If (dreaming here) they ever add more sites and capacity to handle the load, then this stick would be good, but not now.
Share ko lang…
http://www.modem3g.com/huawei-3g-modem/42mbps-usb-modem-1.html?limit=25
21mbps – $115 up depende sa brand
42mbps – $245 up
100mbps – Samsung GT-B3740 LTE Vodafone Stick 4G USB Modem 100Mbps
With the actual speed the telco customers are experiencing, there is no rush to buy those expensive HSPA+ modems. The consuming public can wait for another fews months, until the telcos have finished upgrading their networks and have stable HSPA+ coverage.
is there any E5 model of this kind?
watrboy — here: http://www.yugatech.com/blog/mobile/huaweis-new-pocket-wifi-line-up/
For more info better visit this site, www.mymobile.three.co.uk:8080/mymobile/Huawei/E353/overview.htm and www.get3gnet.com/huawei/huawei-e353. Same info as yugatech about the Smart Rocket/Huawei E353 sold for only $99 in other country like China and whats good about it, is that it is open line unfortunately Smart Telecom made a greedy deal with Huawei and locked it.
@sinistro – actually, the Smar Bro Rocket is also open-line and was able to use a Globe SIM.
More or less the price is right.. hmmmmm but still “China” made so it must be “cheaper” than expected… “more or less” and hope so ^_^
I still don’t think it’s price is reasonable. I’d wait for the prices to go down before getting one of these seeing from the previous trend of dongles.
so that means smart’s rocket plug-it is reasonably priced?