Whether it's just to look good and impress your friends and potential mates, or whether you actually use it for applications other than solitaire, let's say you got yourself a laptop. The next step would be to hook yourself up to the Internet, without actually hooking up. But how? Wa'y Blima!'s here to help. This article is all about wireless access in Cebu.
Actually, it turns out that you don't even need a laptop.
Lately, if you wander around the city of Cebu, you will notice bright red and yellow signs announcing some establishment to be a "hot zone." You might slam your feet on the brakes and do a double-take. "Whoa! THAT carenderia is a hot zone? Well, well, well! The owner must be quite a geek!"
Not so. A spanking new company called Dominion has been going around Cebu and distributing these plastic streamers, and people have been only too happy to hang them on their walls, because it
makes their little place look hi-tech. But that's all that's happened; there is no sophisticated gadgetry in the uptown shops and restaurants. You won't find any servers with lots of little winking green and red lights behind the counters, and you won't find any antennas on the ceilings.
Dominion actually have only one antenna mounted on the roof of the Mango Square mall. This, powered by a technology called Wi-Max, is sufficient to cover a large chunk of the uptown area. Not only are the establishments with the signs hot zones, the streets, sidewalks, and pongko-pongkos are hot zones too.
A hot zone is not the same as a hot spot. A hot spot is an area providing Internet access within the establishment only, and perhaps for a few yards out the door. A hot zone, meanwhile, covers an entire neighborhood.
Dominion is a Cebuano company, funded mostly by a local group of Chinese-Filipino businessmen, who tied up with a group of Manila geeks and American hardware suppliers to try and muscle into the broadband market. The only difference between the established players (Globelines Broadband, PLDT DSL, Mozcom Cable Internet) and Dominion is that Dominion plan to do it without the wires.
Dominion already have most of the Mango and Capitol areas covered. Eventually, their network will be rolled out to cover the major residential areas in Cebu, one antenna per neighborhood at a time.
Sitting in your house in your subdivision, you would plug a weeny little antenna into your computer's USB port. You could do the same at your office, or with your laptop in the neighborhood carenderia. Of course, if your laptop is a high-end model which is already Wi-Fi enabled and has a built-in wireless card, then you don't need the weeny little USB antenna, but owners of desktops and less expensive laptops need to make the trip to SM and purchase the gadget, which costs between 1,000 and 2,000 pesos.
The gadgets are ranked according to their strength, measured in milliwatts, which can range from 15 to 300. The more milliwatts, the more juice your computer can grab off the airwaves, and the stronger your connection with the Internet. But laptop users will justifiably worried about draining their batteries. The Wa'y Blima! advice would be to go for the highest possible milliwattage, so that your trip to Friendster can be accomplished quicker - this will actually save you power.
I asked Dominion if they sell the weeny little antennas. "Oh no," chortles Mr Jed Fidellaga, General Manager of Dominion. "We're about subscriptions, not the retail of hardware!"
Currently, Dominion's Network Operations Center is still under construction, and speeds are a little slow. Plus, the marketing guys still have some things to work out. Plus, their office is still not ready. So Dominion's service is, as of May 7, 2005, free. You just need to head to the Dominion stand at the Mango Square mall and sign up.
Eventually, a monthly subscription will cost you about 889 pesos per month, which is competitive for superfast broadband - Dominion will theoretically allow speeds in excess of 384 kpbs, which is blazingly fast, even for broadband.
Fast or not, relying on subscriptions might be Dominion's weakest aspect. A lot of laptop users who might potentially wish to use Dominion's network are from overseas and other cities in the Philippines; a monthly subscription service would not be a good option for these users.
Currently, the laptop-toting traveller has to make do with hot spots, of which there are a limited number in Cebu City.
There are two companies competing in this segment. GlobeQUEST, part of the Globe conglomerate, operate something called WIZ (Wireless Internet Zones).
There's one at Bo's Coffee Club at Ayala, the lobby of the Waterfront Lahug, Bigbucks at Bigfoot, and, according to the Globequest website, also at the Cebu City Sports Club, Mactan International Airport, Shangri-La's Resort in Mactan, and the Marcelo Fernan Press Center.
The user purchases prepaid credits and, provided her laptop or PDA is Wi-Fi enabled, is good to go. While GlobeQUEST provide the technology, the prepaid credits are purchased from the establishments themselves. At Bo's, for instance, you just need to ask the barrista.
Perhaps because it is geared at travellers, this type of Internet access is insanely expensive. Globequest charge 100 pesos for 50 minutes worth of access, 400 pesos for 24 hours (but this expires within 24 hours of first use), and 1,000 pesos for one week (expires 7 days after first use).
Competing with GlobeQUEST's WIZ system is Airborne Access, who are also in the business of providing technology for hotspots around the country. There are only three Airborne hotspots in Cebu that Wa'y Blima! is aware of, namely the Tinderbox (an upscale restaurant and deli in
Banilad), the Tinderbox's branch at the airport, and the coffee shop at Kartzone. One nice thing about Airborne is that credits can be purchased online.
Last but not least, there's WeRoam, launched by PLDT in March, 2005.
WeRoam is divided into WeRoam Mobile and WeRoam Direct; the latter is somewhat similar to Dominion's system, requiring line of sight to Wi-Max antennas. It seems that WeRoam Direct is geared at Manila corporations who want to expand their LAN to their warehouses or factories. As far as users in Cebu are concerned, we are talking about WeRoam Mobile.
WeRoam Mobile lets users access the Internet via SMART cellphone towers, but is handled by SMART's parent company, PLDT. Theoretically, you can get on the net anywhere SMART has signal, and reach speeds up to 170 kbps, which is equivalent to broadband. The way the technology works is, WeRoam
gives users a wireless PC card (manufactured by Sierra Wireless), into which a SMART SIM is inserted. This card can be used with any laptop that takes PCMCIA standard PC cards - or even a desktop that has an adaptor installed (in the Philippines these adaptors are sold by PC Tech in Manila).
Technically, the SMART cellphone towers are called "base stations," and most of these (roughly 90 percent) come equipped with a technology called GPRS. This will, supposedly, allow WeRoam users to access the Internet at slow speeds, roughly equivalent to dial-up Internet access - less than 50 kpbs.
Around 60 percent of the towers nationwide have, in addition to GPRS, something called EDGE, which increases the speed but only marginally. That's why PLDT executives and engineers will tell you that "it should be emphasized that WeRoam is about mobility rather than speed."
In other words, you can get Internet access anywhere you are, so don't complain if it's slow. The problem, however, is not that it's slow, but that the WeRoam architecture is extremely unreliable, either due to inherent faults or incompetent administration, and service interruptions - lasting anywhere between several hours and several days - are common.
WeRoam Mobile will set you back 2,000 pesos a month, which is not cheap unless your corporate sugar daddy is footing the bill. But, unlike Dominion, SMART already have an existing and functional nationwide network, and you can even use it on the high seas - not just anywhere in Cebu, but almost anywhere in the Philippines as long as there is signal (provided, of course, that their network isn't on strike yet again).
Whether WeRoam Mobile is worth the price of 2,000 pesos and hair lost, torn out while waiting for the service to come back online, is an open question.
