Pinoy Reviews

So, I was looking for a back-up internet provider because lately, Bayantel has been down in our area. Enter the whole page ad by Wi-Tribe in the local papers. 2Mbps for 998? That's the cheapest and fastest connection at that price point, plus the fact that there's no lock-in period until December 2, what have you got to lose, right?

Fortunately for you, I got to try out their service so that you don't have to waste your precious time and money.

So, what is Wi-Tribe's service and what is this "4G" they're talking about? Well, basically, it's WiMax, I don't know what the heck is WiMax but its not like Smart or Globe Broadband wherein you have a dongle with simcard although Wi-Tribe does have a USB dongle which means you can take it with you wherever you go but it doesn't have a simcard so you can't swap out their sim and put it in a much better, nicer looking dongle.

Now that's out of the way, let me talk about their actual service. When their sales representative got to our house to do their demo, they gave me a black Motorola modem which was pre-installed with their service but the default speed you got was around 512mbps until your account got activated. My account got activated within 24 hours and I readily went to speedtest.net to check out their claim of 2Mbps speed. I was surprised that it got past the 2Mbps mark. Nice! Internet browsing was a breeze. I was actually pretty impressed...but that lasted only 24 hours.

The next day, I was prepared to do some downloading. I wanted to watch a 2 minute HD trailer of Hunger Games on YouTube, I was actually hoping that I could watch it without any buffers because 1) it's a 2 minute video 2) I'm supposed to have a 2Mbps speed. 15 minutes passed, I wasn't even at half finished with the trailer!

How about bittorrent? A lot of Filipinos are looking at Wi-Tribe with their 2Mbps speed for torrenting, well, it's a no go. Heck, a torrent with 2000 seeders and 5000 leechers and I couldn't get even get past the 1kbps download speed!!!!! And I'm supposed to be a new customer! Isn't there supposed to be a honeymoon stage of some sort?

So I called up their hotline, which by the way you should be prepared to wait for 15-30 minutes before you get a hold of an actual customer service representative. The troubleshooting includes you disconnecting from your actual wifi router, connecting it directly to your PC, clearing some cache, and then going to Wi-Tribe's website which of course tells you that your speed is beyond 2mbps mark whilst other bandwidth test sites says your bandwidth is just 256-768kbps.

In the end, I realized that as a back-up internet, I shouldn't have applied for the 998 plan but should have stuck with the 598 plan. Now in order to downgrade my plan, I have to pay 2,000 downgrade fee. Whether I should bite it or just turn in my modem to their nearest Wi-Tribe office and apply for a new plan I have yet to think about.  I'll wait another week and see if I can actually get a honeymoon period from them but if you still plan to try their service, stick with the plan 598, it would be a lesser disappointment.