Saturday, April 20, 2013

Smart Launches First Prepaid LTE in the Philippines


Smart announced that LTE for prepaid will be available for sale starting this Sunday, April 21 2013. Just last year, they were also the first one to publicly launch LTE for postpaid. With over 800 LTE sites, Smart LTE is available in 46 cities and 69 municipalities. They also have the most extensive fiber optic network in the Philippines to date at 54,000 kms!

With LTE for prepaid, anyone can try out Smart's superior coverage and ultrafast speeds. They are selling the prepaid LTE sim only kit for P350 and it comes with a free 7-day LTE unli-access (LTE 299 package)


If you want a bundled dongle, the Huawei usb LTE dongle plug-it will be available at P5,995. What I highly recommend is their Huawei LTE pocket wifi as you can share your LTE connection to up to 5 users and it only costs P6,995! Here's an important note to consider. To get a non-subsidized unit outside, you'll have to shell out around 10 grand! Here, you can have it for almost 3,000 pesos cheaper!

I got the nano sim one
Also, Smart made it easy for users as they can choose if they want the,
1) Dual cut prepaid LTE sim kit [Regular cut and micro sim]
2) Nano sim prepaid LTE sim kit

Both are available for prepaid and costs the same price. Also, both has the free 7-day unli-LTE access.

After the 7-day complimentary access, here are the plans you can choose from:
LTE 50 [P50 / 1-day validity] - Text "LTE 50" and send to 2200
LTE 299 [P299 / 7-day validity] - Text "LTE 299" and send to 2200
LTE 995 [P995 / 30-day validity] - Text "LTE 995" and send to 2200

Smart LTE Pocket Wifi by Huawei
Here are the pricing for the Smart prepaid LTE bundles with dongles/pocket wifi:
Smart LTE plug-it P5995.00
Smart LTE pocket wifi P6995.00

For the dongle and pocket wifi, don't worry as it is backwards compatible. Once LTE signal is not detected, it will switch to 3G. For the pocket wifi, average usage is around 5 hours before battery (removable battery) drains and it can connect up to 5 wifi devices.

If you're planning to get the prepaid LTE sim, check if your device uses the 2100 band. If yes, you won't have any problems with it. That's the international band.
Over the past few months, I've been more than satisfied with my LTE speeds from Smart. Nothing beats how reliable it is. I'll be coming up with more reviews for LTE soon.

For more info, visit http://www.smart.com.ph/lte

Cheftonio
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Cheftonio,

I was wondering if you can answer a question I have regarding Smart's (Huawei E589) Pocket Wifi device? I've been searching all over the net, but most blogs I've seen covering this router only talks about its performance/speed, and not much about the features of the device beyond that.

Anyway, since it's supposed to be able to handle up to 10 connected devices at the same time, I just wanted to ask if the built-in router supports NAT tables (for port-forwarding) or any other advanced features like QOS/packet inspection, VPN pass through, DDNS registration, etc...

I just got an LTE SIM for my phone recently and get pretty decent speeds near my area, so I figured if the Huawei E589 is a decent enough router, I'm going have my DSL connection permanently cut off since I'm not getting better performance/speed over LTE/3G vs DSL.

Thanks in advance!

Anonymous said...

Hi Cheftonio,

I was wondering if you can answer a question I have regarding Smart's (Huawei E589) Pocket Wifi device? I've been searching all over the net, but most blogs I've seen covering this router only talk about its performance/speed, and not much about the features of the device beyond that.

Anyway, since it's supposed to be able to handle up to 10 connected devices at the same time, I just wanted to ask if the built-in router supports NAT tables (for port-forwarding) or any other advanced features like QOS/packet inspection, VPN pass through, DDNS registration, etc...

I just got an LTE SIM for my phone recently and get pretty decent speeds near my area, so I figured if the Huawei E589 is a decent enough router, I'm going have my DSL connection permanently cut off since I'm now getting better performance/speed over LTE/3G vs DSL.

Thanks in advance!