PLDT madness

“Check out the June 21st entry”

I can’t believe PLDT MyDSL allowed more than a day. of network downtime! My internet connection was down since 11:00pm Sunday night, came back about 2:30am this morning. How do I know? I made sure to be awake when it came back, just to announce to the world this unacceptable mishap.

Nono’s blog mentioned something about customer support. I dare say that this is the reason why.

Stupid technicians, or worthless equipment?

Could you believe that a telecommunications giant would allow such lack of competence in fixing problems such as this? Why is it that the users are hard coded (or wired) into the nodes that you cant redirect?

What in God’s name did they do anyway that would mess up their network to the extent it would take a whole day to fix, without any estimated time of recovery. “Well call you” they say; what about if work depended on it!? I hope people could sue them for loss of business… that would probably get their asses into gear.

Get a friggin callcenter (or fire the one you have now)

And as if it weren’t bad enough, calling tech support is hell. I dare you people to call them at +63 (2) 173 for tech-support. I’m not lying when I say it’ll take about 5-10 minutes of ringing before someone actually picks up. And there’s no warning message that all operators are full. I think they just wait for the customer to quit the call out of sheer frustration. I was patient in the call since I was reading my 300Ds manual while waiting for someone to pickup.

You should know that I am a very patient man. I’m a techie by heart and I know if a task is difficult or not, and react accordingly. Also, it takes a whole lot to tick me off.

I first called my other peers to make sure it wasn’t an isolated case. And even if it were, that should made them help even more, but that wasn’t the case. I made a total of 4 calls.

1st call (about 10am):

Took about 5 minutes before they could answer.

“Network problems.” They would call me as soon as everything was back online. Fair enough.

2nd call (12pm):

Took about 10 minutes before they could answer.

I called PLDT again since Juan apparently had his internet working already (he was in Greenhills). The guy said it was surprising since the GH area was having bigger problems than ortigas. Not a good thing to say since that just reinforced the fact that Ortigas should’ve been fixed by now.

The point when I began to feel some frustration was at the point wherein he couldn’t explain why it was down, or when they could have it fixed. When talking to a techie, it really helps to just tell them about the hardware problems. That way we understand how difficult the situation is and can increase our patience accordingly, regardless of what work had to be done for that day.

3rd call (4:00pm):

50+ rings before they answered; obviously I was bored with timing the thing, so I just counted the rings to pass the time. Also I’ve just received word that KC, in Ortigas just got back online.

Now this was bordering on unacceptable as this implied a chunk of the day with no-internet. That’s not what we pay them for.

They still couldn’t say what was the cause. Only DATANET, whatever the hell that division was, knew for sure. So I asked for the number and they gave it.

4th call (4:10pm): to DATANET

Complained about the Ortigas node working for others and not for some. They explained that Ortigas was segregated into multiple nodes. Ok that explains it. Then I suggested to transfer me to a working node. I knew it was a long shot and probably impossible since the way they’re setup was certainly not “smart,” but I said it more of to stress the urgency of the situation.

See, the only way to tell customer support the gravity of the situation, knowing fully well they are powerless themselves, is to give them a perfectly logical suggestion, no matter how feasibly far fetched, to show them that they have indeed messed up, that even the perfectly logical suggestions cannot be achieved, in the hopes of them reporting such a sad situation to their superiors. (now that’s a run-on sentence hehehe)

But the arrogance on the other line on the contrary showed that of total apathy and an evasion of responsibility.

“Only the technician knows when he’ll finish.” “We’ll call you.” “We can’t give out numbers of our superiors.”

I just ended the call saying, “well in the long run I can’t really do anything unless I personally know your superior, so I’ll just leave your souls at God’s mercy.” An empty consolation on my part if you ask me.

UPDATE A Product Manager of another PLDT outfit is a friend of mine and mentioned that they are supposed to give out superiors’ contact numbers… they call it “Problem Escalation.” END UPDATE

I really wish the telcos start pumping out more broadband services. I can’t wait for the day when all telcos are forced by competition to start delivering throughput and service like other countries. During our 2004 US tour, any home we stayed in [which had broadband], had excellent throughput: if we get 40KBps here, they get 300+KBps… that’s about 2.5Mbps (notice the diff between B and b so you don’t get confused). And that’s just a residential plan. I can’t imagine why we can’t do that. I think we COULD, but the telcos are monopolizing the technology for nice marketing packages and leverage for the competition.

I relayed to Nono my grief and he suggested I write formal letter of complaint, but I thought “the way PLDT DSL handled this was far from professional, why should I extend such courtesy?

So here I am blogging, shouting in the vastness of the internet hoping someone up there (in PLDT) has the decency or sense of responsibility to their customers, and do something about this.

Oh and by the way, they haven’t called telling me that they have fixed the problem. They asked for my PL# on all of the calls… Wonder if that was just for show.