Stuck in the slow lane with Smart 3G

I've been trying to get Smart 3G working for more than a week now. It seems here in our office, even though a 3G signal is detected, I can't get a connection. So I went to Smart Tower across Ayala to complain. Well.. I ended up with egg on my face as the Nokia 6680 got connected immediately. Glory be! Download speeds were around 60 - 70 kbps which is not world-shattering (not much better than GPRS Class 8!) but already quite good. I never expected the WCDMA 384 kbps rated. Heck GPRS is rated at 57.6 kbps but nobody ever gets that much throughput. So all is as expected.

Unfortunately Smart's 3G "walled garden" isn't totally open yet. I was able to browse Google and Nokia.com but the high ports (RTSP) are not open. Even the streaming content on Smart's own site was inaccessible. Oh well..

On another topic, I've discovered why the no-brand "Muse" 1GB SD card only costs 2,700 pesos. It's pretty slow. I expect part of that is due to the giveaway USB 1.1 SD reader I was using (a free gift from Palm) but transferring 750MB of data took well over half an hour. Throughput was only about 450 kbytes per second. On the other hand, the Ixus SD500 can write 2 frames per second to the card, sustained, at full resolution. Given that the files are about 600 - 800 kbytes each, that means the card has a throughput of around 1.5 Mbytes per second at least. Not too shabby.