Sandwich powers up the new Smart Bro Plug It Prepaid commercial

Photo: Mike Dizon, Myrene Academia, Raimund Marasigan, Diego Castillo, and Mong Alcaraz, known collectively as <S>andwich, pose as a plane divides the sky.

Depending on your preference, Sandwich can refer to two slices of bread with some meat or peanut butter in the middle, the Earl of Sandwich, or a band put up way back in 1998 by ex-Eraserheads drummer Raimund Marasigan and some friends from the outrageously-named band known as the Aga Muhlach Experience.

But just last Sunday, <S>andwich (the band, not the tasty snack) powered up the jingle for the new tv commercial for Smart Bro’s Plug It Prepaid, debuting on ASAP with a live in-studio performance.

Copiously adapted from their previous album’s hit single “Sugod”, Raimund, Myrene, Diego, Mike, and Mong bashed out the jingle dedicated to all the power and the glory of mobile broadband. Sam Milby and Toni Gonzaga are somewhere in there as well. (Hopefully this further contributes to the continued mainstream-ization of the mobile Internet!)

And here’s the video:

Smart Bro Plug It vs. Globe Visibility: Battle of the Network Stars

Photo: Benjamin Grimm and Bruce Banner square off in an argument over mobile broadband.

It was shaping up to be one of those “bad trip” evenings. Our PLDT DSL connection mysteriously went on the blink. And typically, the customer support rep we got on the phone was no great instiller of confidence. She would have to refer the problem to someone else to diagnose, she said, and we wouldn’t hear from them until sometime tommorow.

Luckily we live in one of those peculiar households that is blessed (or cursed?) with a plethora of gadgets at any given time. So if we had to survive a day or two without DSL, we could always whip out a number of wireless devices at the drop of a hat and access mobile broadband. The better to ‘walk the talk,’ as you might say.

This particular evening we had at our disposal a small menagerie of 3G phones, a bunch of prepaid SIMs, and a couple of USB HSDPA modems from two different providers: SmartBro Plug It Prepaid (ZTE MF622), and one from Globe Visbility (Huawei E220). It looks like we were going to rough it a bit, but nevertheless, “we knew we would survive,” to paraphrase Gloria Gaynor.

This was also an opportunity for some Speedtests to pit the access methods against each other. Here are the results. Note that the tests were all conducted in a condo smack dab in Tordesillas Street, deep in the concrete canyons on Salcedo Village, Makati.

Nokia E61i using Smart 3G (Buddy prepaid SIM):

Smart Bro Plug-IT Prepaid:

Globe Visibility:

As with all wireless broadband tests, your mileage may vary depending on your location. In this case, the Smart Bro modem happened to latch on to a Smart HSDPA signal in the area, which really goosed the broadband. The Nokia smartphone is a plain jane UMTS (3G) device and limped on at 3G speeds. And although Globe advertises an HSDPA network, it looks like Globe HSDPA was nowhere to be found in our area (right in the middle of the Makati CBD).

Our elation over the results was shortlived, however. Over in Quezon City, our Twitter friend Jerome Gotangco of Morph Labs had Twittered his own Speedtest results with PLDT WeRoam, pwning us all.

As a Lee named Stan once said, “Excelsior!”