If you want to avail an internet access in the Philippines, I suggest not to opt in Smart Network. They have poor services to their customers. They're always having a service downtime and you can only reach upto 500kbps despite of their promise 3mpbs. So it's better to go to the reliable one.
I used the Smart mobile internet for quite a while in the Philippines and never had any problems at all, and the rates are good too.
Quite. The only time I had anything like decent speed was when we lived in Mandaue some three years ago and subscribed to Sky's 12mbps service. But that's not available to over 99% of the population.
PLDT was ok but expensive 8 or 9 years ago, the real problem is that nothing has really changed in those nine years except the price which is still ridiculous although probably marginally cheaper in peso terms but more expensive in pounds. I get reasonable speed for the connection type about 50% of advertised not that much worse than UK ISP's. Smart and SmartBro were often poor, I use Smart 3G on my phone when I am there and it's fine for what I want which is basically email, I hardly ever browse on the phone but it would be nice to be able to internet share from the phone to a tablet or laptop, not really tried that but I suspect the speeds would be poor, Smart 3G is good enough to allow Google navigation software to work even outside the cities in Luzon so it's not that bad.
I must say though that even with the low internet speeds, communication to the loved one via Skype has never been a problem, can you explain that one for me OSS as I know you know about all that kind of stuff, cheers. I believe her connection is less than 1 mbps and struggles to get You Tube videos up and the like.
People overestimate the bandwidth required for a Skype call even a Skype video call. The audio stream is tiny in the region of a couple of Kb of data, however it is sensitive to dropped packets and out of sequence packets, the video portion is also very highly compressed and only needs 100Kb or less, you can check how much it is using on the call | call technical info menu. Skype's proprietary algorithm's keep the datastream adapting to the conditions at both ends of the call and it is quite incredible how well it does it.
We use CATV here and on their platinum pack I think it is and get 4 mbs !!! Skype is a problem here in that video isn't very good. Face time and tango work pretty well though. Skype is barred on a lot of shops due to the video feed taking up so much of the bandwidth I think face time does it Alot more efficiently
That's a myth Stu, if it is being banned on bandwidth grounds the people banning it don't know what they are on about, to my knowledge Skype uses much less bandwidth than Facetime almost 10 times less for video calls.
I'll look into that, for years that's what I've been told on various ships / different outfits. I wonder if its because we go through a server in Norway and comms are via KU band?
Ku band is susceptible to signal degradation and being high frequency microwaves doesn't go through rain very well, I guess it's going up to the satellite and back down so you would get a lot of latency and maybe a lot of packet retries on Skype, although I would have thought Skype audio would have survived this reasonably well, I'm guessing that the coms is not cheap so they are probably a bit stingy with the traffic
I'm told that audio is ok but video Skype is bandwidth hungry. As I work on a drill ship we have pretty good bandwidth that has actually been upgraded recently. I think it's better than I get here in the Philippines!! We're off Mozambique at the moment so on the whole weather isn't really a factor apart from a couple of months. I suppose ships heading affects it's with shadowing etc. It must be down to latency because as I say every ship in the last 14yrs has barred it.
It may be that your connection is so good that Skype assumes it can use more bandwidth, but say it was the usual lowres camera in a cheap phone then Skype really would not get much above 150kbs (kilobits per second) here's the official bandwidth page https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA1417/how-much-bandwidth-does-skype-need however I have seen it still work with lower quality connections than that. It's also possible that is they thought half a dozen crew members were on Skype during off duty that it was the aggregate bandwidth that they didn't or don't want to allow.
I think that could be the real problem, at shift change you can have 60 blokes or so trying to contact home so the drain on the bandwidth would be quite high.
