DITO Home UNLI 5G WiFi: Affordable and Practical Home Broadband

The latest findings by the Census of Population and Housing (conducted in 2020 and released in July 2023) determined that about 56% of Filipino households have access to internet at home. That’s a little under 14.8 million homes of a little over 26.4 million in total.

What’s more interesting is that of the 56%, over 42% get their connection from mobile broadband services. So, for every 20 homes, 11 have internet, with 8 of them getting access using mobile connectivity.

It’s not surprising that a vast majority of households rely on mobile internet.

The reasons are pretty obvious:

• Last mile solution for many households where fiber lines still have not been reached.
• Readily available solutions with little to no commitment or lock-in period. It may be the same reason a lot of fiber broadband providers are also offering prepaid services this year.
• Sachet economy. Limited disposable income and affordability of “byte-sized” connectivity have their charm. This is the same principle why “Piso WiFi” is still very popular these days.

As such, we continue to see a lot of competition in this space, and with the popularity of 5G technology, it has become more attractive and scalable (well, at least against the old 3G/4G tech).

Among the newest but most aggressive players in this space is DITO.

Since its entry into the market back in March 2021, DITO’s 5G network has expanded to many cities in the country, with almost complete coverage in Metro Manila.

At the time of this writing, DITO Home Unli 5G WiFi Postpaid is available in Cavite, Davao, Laguna, 490 Barangays across NCR, 50 Barangays in Cebu, and 11 Barangays in Mandaue (see complete map of coverage area here 1.6K).

We tried the DITO Home 5G service, and in the past few weeks of using it, we’re pretty much satisfied with the service, coverage, and speed.

There are actually two types of monthly plans you can look into.

The first one is an Unlimited Data Plan, which is pretty self-explanatory – use all you want, anytime with no worries just like any other regular broadband subscription. This plan costs Php1,490 a month (they have an introductory promo of Php745 for the first 6 months).

The second one is a Data-capped Plan with a 200GB monthly data allocation, which only costs Php990 a month. This is great if you are not a heavy user, you seldom connect to the internet at home, or if you are using this as a backup internet solution to an existing wired connection. The best thing about this is that whatever data you did not consume in a month, the excess will be rolled over to the next month (but not beyond that).

Both postpaid plans have a promised speed of up to 500Mbps. From our experience, we’re getting really good speeds in the range of up to 483 Mbps, especially during off-peak hours.

However, individual experiences in terms of speed may vary depending on location and other factors. We’re just glad that our home and office have very good signal coverage from DITO (there’s a DITO tower just 100-200 meters west of our house, so we’re lucky).

In terms of latency, we are getting somewhere between 23ms to 50ms over WiFi and that’s more than useful for playing games that require low latency, like Mobile Legends.

On the other hand, this could also mean you can bring your DITO Home Unli 5G WiFi just about anywhere where there is coverage and you can use it. For the past couple of weeks, we’ve also placed the 5G WiFi inside our car when we go around the city, and it provides WiFi connectivity to the Heads-Up Display (Android HUD) of our vehicle. So far, so good.

Of course, being a wireless service, there are caveats that customers need to be aware of. We asked DITO about this, and here’s the explanation:

“For customers who might experience a slow down at times, this means that the system is being refreshed and upgraded as DITO tries to continue to improve its service so subscribers can enjoy unlimited 5G speed internet connection at a fair price.

DITO’s Unli 5G internet service is unlimited. For areas within 500 meters from serving site, customers can experience up to 500mbps, average speed of 55mbps and minimum speed of 10MBPS at 80% reliability.”

For subscription plans that offer as low as Php990 to Php1,490 a month, this is impressive.

Both plans include a 30-day Prime Video subscription (for subscriptions from January 26, 2023 onwards), and you also earn DITO Rewards points whenever you pay your bill – which you can redeem for other goodies.

With the postpaid plan, you also get a 5G WiFI modem. It’s basically plug-and-play from here on. The modem comes with 4 LAN ports, just in case you need to hook it up to another router or repeater for expanded WiFi coverage.

Here are a few reasons why the DITO 5G Home WiFi can best work with your situation.

• It can serve as an ad-hoc WiFi network in various locations – whether it’s for field work, your week-end vacation home (AirBnB hosts, this is for you!), or even using it inside your vehicle as a WiFi service.
• It also works for a nomadic setup where you need to move around the metro and stay in different places every few months or so.
• Use it as a backup internet at home or in the office for when your primary wired connection goes down or is interrupted.
• As one of the most affordable mobile broadband solution, you can easily get this postpaid kit and have it installed very quickly without the need for a service technician. It’s fast and affordable!

For more info about the DITO Home Unli 5G WiFi, you can check out the DITO website here 1.5K.