In search of 5G

A week before traveling to Baguio City, my biggest preoccupation and concern was being able to go online and host our program “AGENDA” for Cignal TV. Given that Baguio City is up in the mountains, we already knew that internet service could be a challenge, but as we asked contacts in the telco industry, we were given various reassurances that all we had to do was get a 5G phone or a 5G pocket WiFi and we would surely be able to connect. That turned out to be a serious stretch of the imagination. Nonetheless, my wife Karen and I went about studying our options for future requirements and all the effort was nothing short of doing a market study and discovering that the idea was a bad one.

First off, we went and checked the cost of our chosen 5G phone and what would be the most affordable, easy on the budget option. If we bought the phone outright “unlocked,” the cost would be P47,600, so we checked out a 2-year installment “locked in” plan with a telco. For the SMART 5G phone, the total cost would be P65,876 over a two-year locked-in period. The initial down payment would be P11,500 plus P800 per month installment for two years, with a P1,499 monthly plan. For Globe, the upfront down payment would be P33,600 and P1,499 per month, total cost of P69,576. Between SMART and Globe the difference is P3,700. (All based on telco websites.)

The deal breaker is that while many 5G phones have dual SIM capability, you are locked in to your service provider locally and internationally so still can only use your dedicated telco. Given my unwillingness to plunk down P47,600 outright or be locked in longer than I want to be with a service provider, we searched for vendors offering 5G phones at two years to pay with zero interest and we found one at P53,000. That was the best deal for the least or no money down option, but we carried on with the research.

So from there, we looked for other alternatives and learned about the best pocket WiFi’s that reportedly have higher performance than the regular consumer offerings of telcos. The top three ranged from NetGear Nighthawk M5: P34,960; Huawei 5G Mobile WiFi pro: P21,000 (both are open line units) and the SMART 5G Pocket WiFi: P15,995 (according to Philpad.com). So we considered the SMART 5G and even asked for user experience and were told that the unit was effective even in outlying island resorts in northern Palawan. The only hitch once again was that you would be “hitched” or dependent on SMART.

By this time, we were already in Baguio, where most places had such bad LTE signal and registered between 1 to 2 MBPS only. So we decided to try the 5G solution by buying a 5G SIM card and borrowing a 5G dual SIM phone. We tested both SMART and Globe for 5G randomly in different locations, particularly at the Azalea Hotel, at various points of Camp John Hay such as Mile-Hi area and the cluster of restaurants on the bottom end of John Hay. The single fleeting hit on a 5G was somewhere at the ridge of the golf course but was momentary and never ever bleeped again. For days we only got 4G LTE and the best internet service was at the Manor at Camp John Hay that uses PLDT Fiber Optic Internet!

The search for 5G has certainly given me a short course on the matter but what about the millions of students all over the Philippines who have been told to carry on studying online by using their mobile phones and tablets although internet connectivity in the Philippines remains miserable but expensive. I recently had an online chat with a scholar and discovered that in order to use her tablet and go online, she would have to walk several hundred meters over a stretch of muddy road and sit in front of a tiny sari-sari store in order to connect online. This is in the outskirts of Lipa City where SMART and Globe both have LTE presence. In order to make life easier and safer for the young girl, my wife has decided to buy her the more affordable version of pocket WiFi and a monthly load.

If the DICT has failed to establish WiFi’s in every barangay because the department has been so politicized, maybe DepEd Secretary Leonor Briones can find a faster, simpler solution by sitting down with the bosses of SMART and Globe and come up with a subsidized promotional campaign that telcos can sell or offer to every barangay chairman and their purok leaders, who can set these up for their students. This would surely cut and by-pass all the delay and corruption that gets in the way of essential services, especially for students.

Another way of overcoming corrupt mayors trying to hogtie telcos to renting “their” property is for the Commission on Higher Education, Department of Education and the Department of the Interior and Local Government to open up government properties as well as schools, state colleges and universities to be used as cell sites in exchange for the connectivity and internet service for all. The government should open barangays, municipal or city halls or provincial capitals as host for cell sites.

After seeing and experiencing the disconnection that was experienced by Region 8 particularly Tacloban City, I went out of my way to get Globe to set up a cell site inside our property in Lipa City to compliment or form a tandem with a long established tower of SMART inside our neighbor’s property. Let us all clamor for improved networks and signal strength, not just for us but for future generations until 5G becomes a reality and not a bleep on the hill.

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