PLDT MyDSL woes

with banne out of the country and all, i have succumbed to the added expense of a DSL connection. of course i chose PLDT myDSL, as i have heard numerous horror stories about SmartBro -- the only other competition, in my opinion. of course there is Globe Visibility, but the price of a plan was ridiculous.

anyway, 2 weeks into my subscription, i noticed i was never able to load a YouTube video without having to wait for forever. i never really thought about testing my bandwidth download speed until last week. thanks to Speedtest.net, i was able to check exactly how much of my money's worth i was getting:



imagine that! i was running even less than dial up could give me. at times it would even go less than 44 kbps. to be fair, i was connecting to a BayanTel server in Quezon City which PLDT would soon advise does not have the same setup as theirs. instead, i should be connecting to Singapore's NewMedia Express. well, even that gave a measly 132 kbps:



and so i called up 172, and reported my problem. the 172 guys would keep on telling me that the report have been updated (i don't know how much updating 1 report can take) and that technical people would soon be contacting me. well, 3 days passed and i was getting a bit pissed because i was only able to talk to one technical specialist (who asked me to look at my modem and check the twinkling lights) and he was only able to raise my speed to 250+. i called 172 hundreds of times again just trying to get them to give me a technical specialist, but they would not. suffice it to say, i was angry.

so i did something totally desperate. i sent an email to customers@pldt.com.ph and cc'ed some of PLDT's Vice Presidents! (i could have cc'ed the President as well but i thought that would be going too far.) now, the obvious question should be: how the hey did i get the contact numbers of the top honchos?! well, i will have to direct you to Google for you to do your own research. ;)

anyway, this is the letter (edited so you will not stalk me):

To: Customers@pldt.com.ph (PLDT)
Cc: MEDINA, Jose Carlo A. (PLDT); NAZARENO, Napoleon L. (PLDT); NARBONETA, Jose Rodel I. (PLDT); MAGBANUA, Herbert M. (PLDT)
Subject: Will PLDT please help its customer?

Hello,

I am Brian Magalong, a PLDT myDSL subscriber (under my mother's name _______________) from Consolacion, Cebu. My telephone number is _________________.

Since the start of my subscription, I have never been able to achieve the maximum bandwidth which I am paying for. With my subscription, I should be able to avail of a speed equal to or around 1000kbps. Until now, I average 100 kbps, with a range of 40kbps-150kbps.

I have been following the advertised procedure for availing customer support. I have dutifully and patiently called 172, and recounted my problem many times. Always, they say my complaint report has been updated. For all my efforts, however, I was able to talk with one technical support personnel only once -- last Feb 26, 2008. From 40 kbps, he was able to raise my speed to 200 kbps with the promise that the speed will increase in time. Obviously, his promise did not come to pass.

For the past few nights, I have been assured that another technical support personnel will call me up. I stayed up until midnight last night and the night before just waiting for a call. None came.

I am sending this mail as a desperate last resort. Will this company not do anything about my problem? Won't anybody help? My family pays our telephone subscription religiously. Do I at least deserve a good service?

Brian Magalong

(you will have to forgive the melodramatic rhetorical questions in the end. i wrote that while i was sleepy, frustrated and angry.)

the next day, we received around 10 calls from PLDT! my mother must have gotten a good exercise from walking to the phone to pick up the receiver everytime. the day after that, technical specialists came to our house and checked everything. they stopped short of climbing our poste to check if the telephone lines had been worn out! a Manila-based, official sounding boss called me on my cellphone assuring me that the problem is being monitored and that i should text him personally if i am not contented with the troubleshooting from their technical group. whoa!

and then i got this reply to my email:

From: QUIMBO, Corazon R. (PLDT)
To: _____________________
Subject:RE: Will PLDT please help its customer?

Maayong hapon. Your email happens to reach me and I would like to know if your problem is already resolved.

of course, i did what every sane guy would. i Googled her. assured of her identity, i replied:

Hello Corazon,

Last Saturday, there were some PLDT personnel who came to our house to check on the connection. They found that it was indeed unusually slow, although they did not see any immediate reason why.

Over the weekend, they conducted several tests/configuration changes from their end but the speed did not improve. They said that on Monday (should be sometime this morning/afternoon) a technician will personally check on the line. Worst case, we might abandon the faulty connection altogether and just change telephone numbers. I believe this means we will be connecting to a different "node".

I arrived tonight and found my download speed to be 1Mbps. I am very glad of this, although I still hope the speed will be consistent for the rest of the day. As I write, another PLDT technician (from another "group" he says) is calling me over the phone to conduct some tests. I think they are still working on this.

I have been contacted by numerous PLDT personnel these past few days. They have been very polite, and I would like to believe that they are all doing their best to solve the problem. They have all asked me to keep them posted of any changes in my download speed. Tomorrow, I will inform them of the 1Mbps speed I got tonight.

Thank you for your concern,
Brian

to this, our friend replied:

Thank you for your feedback. Yes, that was one of our Technical Specialists based in Pasay, Manila working under NOC (Network Operations Center). We are monitoring the equipment we deployed and customer's feedback like yours greatly help us to improve.

You may want to give this email to your other friends experiencing problems with our new equipment.

Thanks again,

Cora Quimbo
Technical Manager
PLDT Makati

meanwhile, all those times i was at the office, my mother -- my dear nosy, mother -- had essentially befriended all our PLDT callers: from Manila, Pasay, Cebu, who knows where else. from them she learned that my email has indeed caused a rather large raucous in the mothership of PLDT and is putting unusual pressure on the technical team to solve the problem. turns out, my area has long been suffering from irregular DSL speed connections, and they have just deployed new machinery (forgive the term, i am not an ECE major) to address the problem. one even said my email was a "blessing in disguise", a Filipino phrase to mean "something really shitty happened, but at least something good came out of it".

and now the happy ending:



whoa!!! me happy.