Pinoy Bloggers were recently invited by SM Marikina to test their new Wi-Fi service, which was of course offered for free. There were aroud a hundred bloggers or so that were invited in the Live blogging event and there were also a couple of Walk-In wi-fi testers that participated in the event. I also got Interviewed by GMA QTV for the first time! Watch the Clip at the end of the post.

.

The Wi-fi access in certain parts of the mall vary, for those people who arrived early, they were the one who were able to savor the Wi-Fi speed goodness that Sm Marikina can offer, but as the number of bloggers grew, the speed of their wi-fi test beds came ot a crawl, and oftentimes become disconnected.

I was just able to use their Wi-Fi internet connection for just around 30 minutes, and after that as the number of Wi-fi testers crowded the single connection that SM Marikina offers therefore overloading it and making it unusable.

I was able to check my email, able to surf to different sites, but there came a point that I would have wanted to know the estimated speed that their Wi-Fi offers so I tried benchmarking the Wi-fi speed using the free service of Speedtest.net.

The results returned to me was there were only around 97 kbps of download speed and there were only around 65 kbps of upload speed which is, in my opinion, too low to be called a wifi internet connection.

I think SM Markina needs to improve their Wi-Fi thru additional Access points in the mall, so that in the future, even if there was a massive number of internet wi-fi users in the mall, the free wi-fi service of SM Marikina would not be compromised.

Also another thing is that if SM is going to implement it as a a free service for all, there should be additional electrical sockets for the wi-fi users to use.

Well that is still to SM Marikina’s discretion, if they cannot provide users the extra sockets then that would be just fine, but the important thing is to make their wifi connection fast enough.

We must remember that the advent of portable wireless connections that were offered by Globe  Broadband and Smart Broadband are already here, and if other users would opt to use those rather than the crawling speed that SM Marikina can offer for massive number of users , then the efforts of SM Marikina in implementing their Wi-Fi services would be useless nonetheless.

I think this should be the start of wi-fi implementation of SM Malls country wide, its been just the time to offer it since the availability of free wi-fi access in the country has been growing steadily year after year. If SM Marikina have already done it, I know that the rest of the SM Malls that has not implemented it yet would follow suit.

SM Mall would really need to since not the number of internet users has grown into metamorphic proportions including the number of Pinoy Bloggers that started to enter and treat the WWW seriously.
.
And by the way here was a clip of the interview I got at the SM Marikina Bloggers Event!

1. SM Sta. Mesa Wifi And Food Bloggers Event
2. The SM San Lazaro Bloggers Food Event!
3. Google Launches Own DNS Values