SMART still upgrading customers to 3G

If your attention has been drawn to some dramatic television ads of three young women on a top secret mission, it really has to do with Smart upgrading to its new 3G service. The new service has been in the making for SpeedNet for some time and now with all the legal hurdles finally behind, the company is offering Smart subscribers what it calls the true third generation mobile telecom experience.  As of last Sunday application services such as wide-area wireless voice telephone, mobile internet access, video calls and mobile TV have become available in the mobile environment.  According to Public Relations Manager, Ian Courtenay the new system will significantly alleviate the issue of excessive traffic across its network.  Users in remote parts of the country are also now receiving stronger signals.  Courtenay further explained how the switch will benefit Smart customers.

Ian Courtenay, Public Relations Manager, Smart

Ian Courtenay

“The new 3G platform which we commissioned on Sunday, Sunday night basically it’s a new generation of technology that offers a huge bandwidth increase in terms of data and data speeds.  That is the main change that our customers will see.  Of course that will open up the ability for us to offer a lot of other services which are data intensive.  However, customers would also know that we have suffered in the past with congestion issues both with SMS and voice on promotion days and so on.  This new network will increase our capacity to carry voice calls and SMS and so on.”

Isani Cayetano

“Does this in anyway affect compatibility between Smart and B.T.L.?”

Ian Courtenay

“No.  It should not affect at all and of course with the huge work that we have undergone.  It has been almost a year in terms of laying it out and getting the commercial agreements with B.T.L. for interconnection and so on behind us.  The actual technical work of switching over our entire network to the new network and then switching all our customers over, you know, that has been keeping our engineers busy and so the technical aspects of it are being undergone as we speak.  But in a few days we expect all those issues to be ironed out and everything should be working fine.”

Isani Cayetano

“For the average user what are some of the things that they can now be able to accomplish using the 3G platform?”

Ian Courtenay

“Well for all of our users basically once we have properly fine tuned the system and so on the main benefit will be that they will no longer have the congestion issues say on a Friday evening or on a promotion day.  SMS, once that is sorted out, will be as well we won’t have the late delivery of text and so on that we have been plagued with.  For our data customers and those who are interested in data they are the ones who will see a dramatic increase in the service.  Downloading of ring tones and music and those applications and stuff will be much, much faster and they will see that difference immediately and then the other services that we will be able to offer, for instance maybe the live broadcast of Channel Five and so on, will be, once our system is working properly, will be possible.  The new network also increases our network footprint so customers who are in the rural areas or in areas that have low or weak signal would have noticed an increase in the amount of bars on their phones.  So that is also something that customers will notice right away.”

There have been some minor kinks since the introduction of the new service, but Smart says it is working diligently to eliminate the problems.