Lousy Internet Service part 3
The last thing I thought of before, was to see this write up in three parts – alas, fate dealt a different blow, and I’m forced to share, once again, my frustrations with the Internet service… or to be clearer, non-service might be a better word. that we – as in my family and i, were experiencing.
Last time, I wrote about how frustrated we were with PLDT’s DSL service being intermittent… and as the holiday came – non-existent. Well, this made us decide to shift from PLDT to Globe – after all, we were hearing good comments from people we knew about how stable their Globe internet was – so we did just that. We got ourselves a Globe wireless DSL, complete with a phone… and the first few months were heaven.
Service was fast, and consistent. I thought that was it for this article… in fact, I think I wrote part two of this as a form of closure… just to let others know how much better my internet service was those days.
I guess good things don’t last… and now I’m writing this in reaction to once again not having any internet service at all during the holidays… zip… nada… nothing. unless you accept the fact that we’d get about 5 minutes worth of service – then two hours of no service… I mean, c’mon… 5 minutes, at the speed i was getting, wasn’t even enough to update a Facebook status… let alone, read and answer email from friends. So yeah… I’d say, there was no decent internet service available to our household during December.
To Globe’s credit though, their customer service was way better than what we experienced with PLDT – they were kind and responsive… we had people come in to check our hardware (checked out okay), they suggested we had an external antenna connected – just in case it was all these concrete walls in close proximity limiting the search and acquisition of their signal; and their technician came after a few days to do just that.
So here we were, with a hot spanking new external antenna – and we still could not receive consistent internet signals. To make sure, the technician double-checked our modem and PC… no problem there… so that left us with one possible problem… the transmitter.
Now I won’t pretend to know the details of how wireless internet connection works exactly, but I have this sneaky feeling that there is a pool of available signals up for grabs – and to ensure that services are not poor, there would – in my opinion, have to be a ceiling to be followed as to how many people should share said signal. Go beyond that and we start feeling degradation of said signal. I mean, that seems to be the way in wired networks – so I think wireless would have the same headaches.
At first, our wonderful internet service was starting show stressful moments during week-ends, meaning there seemed to be difficulty at our getting any connection starting Friday evenings, and that would last until Sunday… which led me to think that the shared pool considered the possibility that not everyone would use the maximum capacity all the time, since most would be in school or at work… great business sense – if you can get away with it. But the service we signed up for was supposed to be unlimited, meaning it should be available 24/7 – which was clearly not the case. Now I don’t know if people pretended not to know – which would mean they were trying to get away with the capacity load problem, or worse… were really inept at ensuring service was being given… but whichever the case may be, the end result was lousy internet service.
Like I said – hats off to the customer service pool, all the way to the responsive technicians… but what happens when the problem is more infrastructure? I heard that there was a hardware change – from Nokia transmitters to another brand… Erickson, I think, which might explain part of the reason for the degrading of signal sometime December, but after that had been properly installed and working, shouldn’t the service (and signal) be better? I mean, wouldn’t that be the idea?
It looks like a classical case of ‘Sales’ over-selling the available service – either ignorant of… or just ignoring any performance ceiling… and ‘technical’ getting stuck with the ‘overstretched coverage’ or ’spread out too thin signal’ to meet customers’ demands problem in this one… but the bottom line is, we… the paying consumers, get left in the poor service rut, and we don’t really care which department is at fault.
Sure… Globe may be willing to talk about rebates or write-offs for services undelivered… but how do you equate the inability to connect to friends and loved ones during these past holidays? Now these may not have been transactions worth millions – but they were lost cherished moments, nonetheless.
Aside from that… it can simply be frustrating when for all your efforts in trying to do some possible repairs to get the system running, all I get from Windows is the diagnostic message: There may be a problem with your Domain Name Server (DNS) configuration. Windows failed to fins a well known host “www.microsoft.com” using the DNS. The server may be down.
As it is, we’re thinking of switching to another provider – sure, there’s a lock-down on the service, but if one party can’t seem to deliver what was the agreed upon service, isn’t the other party within their right to dissolve the contract? After all, we were never delinquent with our payments.
The big question though, is… if the two biggest Telecom service providers in the Philippines can’t deliver internet service that is both responsive and really available 24/7 – specially during weekends, then who do we turn to?
A friend mentioned cable… and we already do have cable TV, so maybe… just maybe… that would be worth a try. So definitely, I’ll have a part four for this… and hopefully… it will be a real closure to this problem.
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