Anyone here has switched to Ultera? Kindly give us feedback please. Im just guessing that a cabled DSL is still more stable than wireless LTE , right? Or i could be wrong. There are 3 plans and have cap limit per month though there are recommended GB usage. Speed drops down to 30% once cap is reached. Plan 1599 is 5Mbps and 1999 is 10Mbps! Plan999 is just the same as DSL which is 3Mbps.
i have one in the jobsite. plan999. its fast and stable and does the job. not really heavy on the usage, just browsing, emailing and some streaming and no torrent, took it to another location about 3kms away and its not working. cant seem to catch any signal.weird. my location is in the province btw. im thinking not much users in my vicinity thats why lte is stable and fast. then not much coverage outside of town hence not working in my other location. but 3kms is not that far.
I applied for one to replace our Laguna Wi-tribe connection who has been problematic since 2 months ago. I think coverage without antenna is just 1.5km from the base station. We are about 1.7/8km away and we couldn't even get a bar of signal but the modem sees the tower FWIW. This is a great alternative esp. with PLDT learning from Globe's LTE@Home. What's special about this is that they use another LTE standard called TD-LTE so this requires new equipments 228+ base stations during launch with target of 1,000 by year end. Unfortunately, having SMART LTE is not a good indicator for having Ultera coverage. We have 4 bars of SMART LTE in our area and no Ultera coverage. Cap is also a factor. If you are a regular user (note: not even a heavy user), this cap means that you need to look at the after-cap scenario and if you can live with 1, 1.5 or 3mbps speeds. Let's face it, that's the real speed you are paying for since the data allowance is surprisingly small (and per month!) unlike Globe's daily allowance. sources: PLDT to fire up 1,000 TD-LTE sites for faster Internet link | Business, News, The Philippine Star | philstar.com TipidPC.com | PLDT Ultera (lte) thread
Finally got Ultera Outdoor installed today, the modem is router-like in size and design with PoE (Power over Ethernet WAN Antenna) input, 2 LAN ports only and still manufactured by Huawei and significantly different from the Indoor and Globe supplied standing version. Getting 4 bars of signal. RSSI around -64 to -66 RSRP is around -92 to -94 RSRQ at around 6 to 8 SINR is around 22-26 depending on the weather (its was rainy when installed) Ultera 5mbps 1599 Plan Ping around 31 to 40ms to Smart Metro Manila Server Speedtest uncapped is at ave. 6mbps (bursts at 10 and then slows down to 6 before it ends) Speedtest after cap is 1.4mbps (starts at 3mbps and halfway drops down to 1.4mbps steady) Note: Capping is 15GB/month but implemented on a daily basis (500MB/day) refreshes the next morning. (Plan 999 3mbps is 10GB/month 300MB/day, Plan 1999 10mbps is 30GB or 1GB/day). Youtube quality: 480p max without intervention, 720p buffers (this has something to do with PLDT-YouTube server problems though) Download from Apple Appstore - Full speed Skype: No dropped calls, minimal choppiness FaceTime: No dropped calls, pixelated and laggy though. Download from media streaming sites (PPS, PPTV and Funshion Chinese apps) 100-200KB/s only. Overall: Not bad but still not better than a wired connection, this is overall better than Wi-Tribe. Location: Sto. Tomas Biñan, Laguna. The tower is near Biñan Municipal Hall (1.5kms away) The tech said his team only got 8 sets of outdoor modem-antenna for their service area so this means the deployment for outdoor systems are limited as of the moment. P.S. We also have LTE@Home with Globe in Tagaytay and I prefer their implementation with generous 10GB/day data cap at same plan 1599 with free home phone to boot!
wow! I was just about to apply for one and that info on per day capping is crazy! I'll stick with my wired connection for now. Thanks for the info Richard.
iDarwin Ultera is no replacement for wired. I suggest people get wired if given a choice. Us, we don't have a choice in our area.
After testing it for about half a year here is my long term usage analysis: Ultera has deteriorated in our area. We only get full speeds at 4/5am to around 9AM. They can't even give the promised 1.5mbps after-cap speed for our plan. (only getting around 0.8mbps). But I'm thankful that the disconnection problems that existed on the first few months are gone. And also thankful that we are able to subscribe before PLDT implemented the 256kbps after allowance speed (regardless of plan).
Got Ultera installed in my house on White Beach, Puerto Galera. I ordered the 10Mbps package. On speedtest.net I barely get 2Mbps both up and down LOL. This was around lunch time and I tested again just now 7PM with the same result. My biggest concern though is with the settings. Has anybody found out how to change admin name and password? Looks like it's the same for all Ultera users LOL.
