GlobeQUEST expands Wi-Fi reach

GlobeQUEST, the corporate business group of Innove Communications, has embarked on an aggressive rollout of Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) service in key areas nationwide.

It has forged four domestic and international roaming partnerships that would allow seamless Internet connectivity to business travelers in the country and abroad.

"Innove’s vision is to bring the Filipinos to the broadband age. To support this, GlobeQUEST provides broadband facilities like Wi-Fi to major key establish-ments where people converge for business, as well as promote Wi-Fi as a strategic tool for educa-tion, local government projects, product advertisements, and foreign ventures, among others," said Jesus Romero, GlobeQUEST head.

Given this, GlobeQUEST has expanded to provide coverage not only in Metro Manila but to 13 areas elsewhere in the country, namely Cebu, Davao, Bohol, Bacolod, Tacloban, Pampanga, General Santos, Baguio, Olongapo, Cavite, Batangas, Laguna, and Ormoc.

To date, GlobeQUEST has 275 Wireless Internet Zone (WiZ) hot spots, and Romero is confident that they would reach the 500 mark by yearend.

As a commitment to service quality, Romero said GlobeQUEST sees to it that the best possible coverage will be established prior to a joint certification with the hot spot partners, leaving the esta-blishment accessible to WiZ and ready to use by its customers, ready to sell, and ready to market.

In line with this, he said WIZ only uses carrier grade equipment in its hot spots and in the back-end support systems and is fully managed and monitored round the clock.

GlobeQUEST WiZ is also the first public Wi-Fi hot spot service in the country using the Wi-Fi mesh architecture, with the beachfront area of Boracay as its initial market.

A mesh architecture provides increased coverage and band-width depending on the number of access points deployed and is relatively inexpensive, very reliable and resilient.

So far, GlobeQUEST has partnered with a number of popular establishments nationwide, provi-ding them with managed end-to-end solutions to ensure better flexibility, reliability and accessibility of their Wi-Fi service.

"We don’t just put up a WiZ hot spot anywhere. We make sure that all our hot spots are in strategic areas, in a sense that they must be establishments where businessmen and transient Internet users normally converge such as airports, coffee shops, convention centers, golf clubs, resorts and restaurants. We want to be where it matters to our customers," Romero said.

GlobeQUEST’s newest WiZ hot spots include Mezze at Greenbelt 2, Outback Steakhouse at Glorietta 4, McDonalds and Casino Español in Cebu City, L’Fisher Hotel in Bacolod City, and McCafe at Glorietta 3.

GlobeQUEST has also reached an agreement with Starbucks to expand its coverage from a current installed base of 32 in-store hot spots to potentially all of its existing coffee shops.

Meanwhile, GlobeQUEST has successfully integrated its Wi-Fi network with leading local Internet service provider (ISP) Pacific Internet for the latter’s postpaid subscribers, and three of the world’s leading Wi-Fi network aggregators, namely BOINGO Wireless Inc., iPass, and Deutsche Telekom. 

As a result, end-users of these companies will have Wi-Fi access in all of GlobeQUEST’s WiZ hot spots in the Philippines using the username and password issued in their home country.

With iPass, however, all Innove subscribers (Globe—QUEST, WorldPass, and Visibility) who travel around the world can also use either dial-up or Wi-Fi in all of iPass’ points of presence (POPs). 

So far, iPass has integrated over 300 network providers covering over 60,000 access points worldwide, including more than 35,000 Wi-Fi hot spots and Ethernet hotel broadband locations in about 60 countries.

On the other hand, US-based BOINGO Wireless, which has over 20,000 hot spots, provides high-speed Internet services to its individual end-users and wireless access service providers who intend to resell their Wi-Fi services. 

The Deutsche Telekom platform connects Wi-Fi providers and hot spots’ operators from over 20 countries.

Deutsche Telekom is Europe’s largest telecommunications company and one of the leading carriers in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, as well as North and South America. 

Romero said the roaming agreements further solidify the position of WIZ as the most convenient Wi-Fi service, allowing access via pre-paid vouchers, post-paid plans and its innovative "wiz on" service, which allows any Globe HandyPhone postpaid user to download a username and password and be billed via his cellphone through a simple text message request.

GlobeQUEST WiZ is a broadband Internet service using the IEEE 802.11b or Wi-Fi wireless networking standard to provide secure and reliable wireless connectivity to anyone with a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop or personal digital assistant and thus, allow them to access their e-mail, play online games, surf the Net or even make a call. 

A Wi-Fi network can be used to connect computers to each other, to the Internet, and even to wired networks which use 802.3 dubbed as the Ethernet.

Wi-Fi networks operate in the unlicensed 2.4GHz and 5GHz radio bands with an 11Mbps (802.11b) or 54Mbps (802.11g) data rate or with products that contain both bands (dual band) so they can provide similar performance equivalent to the basic 10BaseT wired Ethernet networks.