Taking Smart LTE for a spin

I was among the first batch of beta testers for Smart LTE and even though I’ve been going around the metro almost every day, it’s still hard to spot those 20+ LTE sites. I’m hoping that their numbers will grow in the coming months.

While some of my fellow beta testers have been hitting 17Mbps to 63Mbps, I have not been as lucky as them. Been to the Greenhills site but did not find the signal, the Megamall site is indoors and with the vicinity of the JUMP Center but I was checking from the 4th floor parking and didn’t detect it. The two sites where I was able to get an LTE signal was at Greenbelt and Mall of Asia.

For the testing purpose the area of coverage is actually smaller — around 200m in radius (I am told this will be extended to 1.2km once everything is ready and optimized).

Here are some sample speed tests I made at the MOA site earlier today (outdoor North Parking lot):

The download speed isn’t as impressive as I expected it to be but it’s possible there’s someone else in the area sharing it with me. However, the upload speeds of 7Mbps is crazy (for those uploading HD videos on YouTube) fast.

The results of the speed tests I got at the Greenbelt 3 sites yesterday was mediocre but I hear other testers are able to hit over 10Mbps around here.

I am hoping I’d have some more time to check out the Ayala sites as well as the one in Greenhills and Megamall again.

Notice the really low latency rates on these speed tests (fast Ping times). I also noticed the dial-up time of the Mobile Partner (Huawei dialer software) is pretty fast — under 1 second to connect to the network.

My top download speed is around 0.5MB/s which isn’t bad (again some testers are reporting 1MB/s download speeds). I guess I’m just not as lucky as them.

I’m hoping the number of sites will improve and the signal range be extended so I can have more time to use the LTE network and really get the hang of it.

Update: After several attempts, I finally found a really nice spot at the Greenbelt 2 open parking (the one beside McDo) and got very good speeds of up to 40Mbps.

Did some torrent downloads and the cumulative download speed reached a very fast 1.9MB/sec.