Actually its completely band dependent, F2 5G >25GHz will severely be effected by trees and foliage. I work with testing 5G coverage and selling 5G test equipment for drive/walk test of new builds and this scenario. F1 5G <6GHz will have slightly less problems but still not as good as low band LTE in 700MHz. The set-up on new sites with multiple technologies will rely on older tech 700, 900MHz (3G) to reach basements, middles of buildings (with no DAS) and far field subscribers and then use many small cells (lamposts every second building etc) for 5G penetration so you can imagine rural will not get the benefits.

700MHz band is the best at building, obstacle penetration and range as dictated by the wavelength at that band. Currently Smart and Globe have huge 35MHz chunks of 700MHz (Band 28 or APT700 to be specific). San Miguel had the entire band under Belltel and sold this to the Duopoly and of this of this and left a very small band for the 3rd Operator or Dito.

Also if your handset is an older US iPhone there were variations on US and Rest Of World handsets. US 700MHz is set up very differently from the ROW. I think this is better in latest handsets.

Try this app "Network Cell Info" for android, the free version gives you a lot of info and is brilliant at giving you all the information for fault finding Dito and others. Gives you all band info and towers connected (on map screen), see screengrab from my phone and you can see gauges for connected cell and next closest cell for both SIMs, SIM 1 is band 28 and SIM 2 is Band 8.

Dito is using VoLTE or Voice over LTE so to make calls this feature will need to be supported by the handset but if you want data only should be covered by nearly all handsets in the past 5 years.

 

Bad news Skippy. DITO uses band 28 so you cannot use the base station router advertised on Lazada. Maybe try one of the unlocked old Globe routers.

Attached is the screen shot from Network Cell Info. You get a strong signal so you can use your smart phone as a hot spot when the cable is down. Friday night was 10 Mbs down.

 

It is a massive project to get stand alone cell sites and a fiber backbone to the whole country. Ditos targets in their contracts with the government are extremely ambitious and they have used the pandemic as an excuse to slip on the key targets but more recently they have been hitting them.

Dito does not operate on just band 28, they have segments across all bands allocated to them, small segments when compared to Globe and Smart but this is normal band allocations in other countries with multiple networks. They may not use all bands in various locations and I think this is how they will try to meet targets, roll out single cell one band/sector sites as quickly as possible then follow up with more bands later, if they can display a single user getting >20Mbps in a location that is a tick. The shared tower projects that are underway will help them cover other areas later as site acquisition/leases is some of the hardest parts of building a network, this is a good initiative from the government. If they mandated a reasonable fixed cost for network sharing (local roaming), DITO uses Smart or Globe network when no DITO available this would go a long way to making them competitive.

What Smart and Globe have done is terrible for competition but the government/s have let it happen for 20 years. Two of the most profitable carriers in SEA, they have no concerns about CHURN, they price match each other on offerings and deals. Up until this year have forced many users to have two SIMs due to high inter network call costs and no number portability. This can be seen in their stats Globe has 81.7 Million subs (June 30, 2021) and Smart has 71.6 Million subs (June 30, 2021), there is only 105M people yet combined they have 153.3M active subs and not all of them have phones. Young kids, elderly, extreme poor are not using handsets, yes some could be second SIMs in tablets but its not as big a percentage as you would think and this may have increased with the pandemic and massive uptick in the use of cellular modems for internet which in reality you should be able to use your phone for. So for many users two SIMs or handsets here is the norm because their networks are terrible.

Number portability was meant to roll out to prepaid subs in 2019 but they pushed it back and this year it is mandatory for the networks to do this. This is 15 years later than countries like Australia for example. The ability to carry your number to another network is the foundation to drive competition and if same day or 48 hour transfer mandates are enforced then the networks will have to up their game to not drop subs so deals and costs to end users should be more competitive and you dont have to put up with the shoddy service they provide in many areas.

If DITO was fully Filipino owned and not a Chinese backed network then I would move as much of my business to as possible to support them, Globe and Smart are terrible for passing on genuine decent priced services to the people here and a proper shake up is 10 years to late.

 

When Dito comes to Pamplona I will be all over it, do not care if half Chinese as Globe and Smart have had plenty of time to arrange a usable network but have failed ...