Review: Sun Cell’s Call and Surf Unlimited 999

With my ever increasing demand to stay connected to the Internet, I decided to try Sun Cellular’s Broadband Wireless Call and Surf Unlimited Plan 999. I was a bit hesitant on getting this plan because I wasn’t able to find any review of this service. But alas, the household is in need of another line, so going for broke, I got the said plan.

Great thing with Sun, when you avail of a line, if you will be using a credit card to autocharge the bill, you could get line and phone immediately. You don’t have to wait for several days to have your application approved. There are two phones available for the said plan, a Sony Ericsson Xperia X8 and a Samsung Galaxy 5. Choosing X8 was a no brainer for me, seeing how very poor the reviews of Galaxy 5 compared with X8. Though I was able to get the phone immediately, I still had to wait almost 24 hours to get the SIM to get activated. I would also like to add that you can’t have a preferred number with the Wireless Broadbands, unlike the regular line. I was planning to get a number ending with 1337, or just have something like +63922REIZEN, or just retain my old number, unfortunately, it wasn’t possible.

The next morning after the sim was activated, I found myself unable to surf the Internet. Unfortunately, no connection setting was included on the phone nor available instructions on how to set it up. I spent a good deal of searching the Internet for the solution and stumble upon the correct setting. Why not call the technical support of Sun if you may ask? I have plenty of experiences with talking with Sun’s technical support representatives and all of them ended as if I had gained nothing. So instead wasting 10-15 mins of waiting for a represantative to answer and another 10-15 minutes of talking with a human with machine like response, I might as well research on my own. Because of I will still ended doing the later anyway.

Here are the settings, there are two sets, for 1.6 and 2.1 Android. If not specified, just leave the setting blank. These can be found on Settings > Wireless and network settings > Mobile Networks


for 1.6
Name: SBW Call and Surf (doesn't matter what you name this)
APN: fbband
Proxy: 202.138.159.78 (optional, you may leave this blank)
Port: 9201 (optional, you may leave this blank)


for 2.1
Name: SBW Call and Surf (doesn't matter what you name this)
APN: fbband
Proxy: 202.138.159.78 (optional, you may leave this blank)
Port: 8080 (optional, you may leave this blank)


A minor problem is that sometime the phone connects to a Edge(GSM) network even if there is a 3G(WCDMA) network. If I want to connect to the Internet I have to manually set the Preferred network Connection to ‘WCDMA only’.

(I don’t know if the following statement is true to other phones but this is true with the X8 that I got with the line) Another caveat for always being connected to 3G and having Data Transfer enabled is the very short discharge time. I could only go by a day with a fully charged phone. At one time when the phone was having trouble staying connected to a 3G network, the battery heats up and discharges very quickly, the phone only lasted for 8 hours.

Now how about the Internet connection. The browsing was quite fast, acceptable for using a mobile browser. So I benchmarked it using Speedtest.net Speed Test Application for the Android. Here are my results

Ping(in ms)	Download(in kB/s)	Upload(in kB/s)	Server	Location
152	44.9	39.1	Quezon City	On LRT, Manila
119	202.7	53.7	Singapore	Ortigas
146	118.4	56.5	Singapore	Quiapo, Manila
130	86.0	51.2	Makati City	at Home in Caloocan City

On this trials, I just wanted to know if they could Sun could really deliver the advertised 2Mb/s speed(which is roughly around 260KB/s). Unfortunately, the numbers doesn’t quite reflect the advertised figures. As far as bandwidth cap, I am not aware of such. I think I’ll buy the tethering app for Android so that I can maximize the data transfer and test beforehand if such a cap exists with this service.

Final Verdict
I’ve been using Sun Cellular for over 2 years now and quite satisfied with their service, in terms of general SMS`ing and calling. But I was very disappointed with mobile Internet service. I overall, the service is very poor. Granted that Sun is quite new to this and has very wide room for improvement. Nevertheless, this is the most affordable service of its kind in the Philippines, so if you’re itching for being connected all the time, you can grab this service but don’t expect it be blazing fast and very reliable.

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