With only a few games left until the NCAA Final four, The San Sebastian Stags cling on to maintain their spotless record. But it won't be an easy road ahead for the Stags. They yet have to face defending champion San Beda Red Lions and number two seed Letran Knights. The Stags is set to face the Knights on September 30, the Pirates on Oct 5, 2011 and the Lions on October 12

The Sebastian Stags is just coming off a 3 point win against the MIT Cardinals last September 16. Are they showing signs of exhaustion or has the Cardinals improve significantly? I guess we will just have to see if the Stags could complete the sweep the way San Beda did last year. If they do become successful, they would enjoy a good rest while waiting for the 2nd to 4th seed to battle it out for the right to go to the finals. Any team who is undefeated after the two elimination rounds would still have to meet the challenger on a best of three championship series. A few years back the first seed would enjoy a twice to beat advantage in the Finals.

The defending champions San Beda Red Lions is showing signs of exhaustion as the Bombers surprised everyone by beating the Lions last September 14 with and score of 76 to 65 favoring JRU. Losing Sudan Daniels due to injury this season is taxing to San Beda's bid to retain the title this year. San Beda is yet to meet College of St. Benilde on September 28, Letran on October 7 and San Sebastian on October 12.

Letran has been doing great this season. Only losing 2 games during the first round against San Beda and Sebastian. With only 3 games left this season, Letran could end up with a 14-4 win loss standing if they fail to win against the Stags and Lions.  Letran is set to face the stags on September 30, the Blazers on October 3 and the Lions on October 7.

I brought my laptop in UP Technohub and I am testing the Sun Broadband service. I am downloading files and browsing the internet at the same time. It is quite slow and pretty manageable. It would take a while though to open a site.

I checked the internet speed using speedtest.net. It takes a while to test the internet speed using this site. After five minutes of waiting, I got the results Download speed is at 0.36 Mbps (368.64 kbps) while upload speed 0.21 Mbps (215.04 kbps).  Based on the Sun broadband panel, the current internet speed would around 60 kbps to 200 kbps. The speed is fluctuating and most of the speed based on the Sun broadband panel would be around 50 kbps. I also tried checking using bandwidthplace.com. Download speed is at 268 kbps (33.5 KB/sec transfer rate) while upload speed 186 kbps (23.3 KB sec transfer rate).

In conclusion, the broadband service in UP Ayala Technohub is around 6 (highest is 10). I encountered difficulty in accessing some sites. I received an "Page cannot be displayed" or "No data received" on some sites. I tried watching Julie Ann's cover of superbass  from you tube and it took me two attempts to watch it. During the first attempt I encountered a "No data received error prompt". The second attempt went smoothly. I tried uploading a video in Facebook  (something that I have been trying in San Mateo). I wasn't able to upload it as well

I am always on the lookout for a internet service that would cater to my needs. I have been using a Sun Broadband plug-it for months and I am pretty much satisfied with the service. Now SmartBro has released a broadband that could reach up to 12 Mbps on a HSPA+ network. But here is the catch, there are only 150 HSPA+ sites in the Philippines. So that simply means that you could reach the 12 mbps speed only on some parts of the country. Some parts of Metro Manila, Cebu and Davao has HSPA+ connectivity.

This sounds promising on paper. But I wonder if someone using the Rocket plug could actually maximize the usage. Another problem that I see here is that, it is initially in prepaid. That means you have to reload your account from time to time to stay connected.

So even though you could reach a maximum of 12 mbps , the minumum connection speed is around 12 to 48 kbps. So does that mean that if your not within a HSPA+ zone, connection speed would be something similar to a regular Smart Bro plug-it?

I would like to get a Rocket plug-it but I have my doubts. I am not sure if the rocket plug it would meet my internet needs.