Globe Broadband Tattoo Test: Punta Fuego

Posted on October 30th, 2009. Written by Rico.

It’s been a while since I’ve tried out Globe Broadband Tattoo. Now however I’m in Punta Fuego, but too sick to swim and enjoy the beach. So I’ll just take in the beach air while testing Globe’s wireless broadband service.

To summarize, speeds were decent, though I had to remain near a Window or a balcony, as I needed the air to clear my nasal passage and Globe’s signal would suffer otherwise. Practically spending the whole day surfing, it would be hard to gauge the average speed of the connection based on how much data was downloaded throughout my entire session. According to the logs over 70MB was downloaded and 16MB was uploaded throughout the 8-hour connection.

Speed.io tests should provide a more accurate pictures, so I conducted three of them over a 5-minute period. Here are the results:

Or an average download speed of 174kbps and an average upload speed of 301kbps. Yes, it’s weird that uploading was faster than downloading. Surfing overall was fast, but sometimes pages don’t load completely, stuck on “loading”, irritatingly forcing you to reload them.

I also noticed that most images I loaded on my browser were automatically turned into low-quality JPEGs. Has anyone else noticed this? Click on the links below to see what I mean

Image loaded through my home broadband connection

Image loaded through Globe Broadband Tattoo

See the difference? It’s obvious that, to cut down on bandwidth requirements, Tattoo is automatically downgrading image quality. In the above example, what was 20kb was shrunk down to 9kb. What gives Globe? This definitely helps pages load faster, but do you really want people to be looking at uglier websites?

In any case, once I find new areas to try out Globe Broadband Tattoo, I will, so stay tuned, dear readers!