Lousy Internet service

Have you ever had the experience of paying for your first-ever D.S.L. service, getting it right the first few months, then suddenly finding it difficult at times – later difficult to get a signal most of the time, and still having to pay said D.S.L. services because of a 2-year lock down on services your supposed to be getting?

How many of you are in this same boat?

My D.S.L. service falls under P.L.D.T. and for the most part – including today, the above first paragraph, specifically the latter portion of said paragraph is what my family has been experiencing this past holiday season.

Reason enough for me to write this entry in MS Word at my home PC (its currently 12 noon, January 2, 2008)- hoping to post it later should we find an internet connection that is actually working constantly, or worse, maybe I have to go to another location – pay more, just to upload this entry.

By the way, I’ve been able to insert this in 2:50PM, January 3, 2008... almost a day later. This is not just based on P.L.D.T. D.S.L.'s availability, but my availability to access it as well. After all, tehy could claim that during the times I was out, they had some service - but when you consider this service to supposed be 24x7, that can't be an excuse.

note: I would normally be in the office at this time, had I not still been on vacation leave - so even if there is currently available service, this has the tendency to degrade after office hours... when I (and possibly everyone else) need it at home.

We’ve done the usual calling up the company to report this – and we get assurances that things will be looked into… but I wonder if things really get looked into. No follow up calls telling us what the problem’s cause was, what action items were considered and if our lives are now better with said promised service now being given to us.

In many companies, this would fall under ‘not meeting Service Level Agreements’, on the assumption that service was being provided and should it not be provided as agreed upon, certain levels of remuneration to the affected party which did not receive said agreed service would be automatically in place.

Unfortunately, ‘us’ public consumers – the ones that get the cheaper D.S.L. services individually, and not through a company seem to be at the bottom of this service provider's priorities. I guess, people like us have no clout - hence are not worth worrying about in terms of (non)quality services being received.

Calls of complaints are taken, noted, and possibly lost in the shuffle between the root cause assessment process/repair considerations… possibly even placed in a folder called ‘not really worth solving’... or why bother with a folder when the trash can is just right there?

Well I, for one, am getting frustrated and its times like this that I wonder if we can somehow come up with a stronger consumer protection program to get enough clout to get P.L.D.T.-D.S.L. to fix their service. If anyone reads this and knows, let me in on how we can do just that – for I am really tired of sub-standard service being given to me by way of my rarely-accessible internet connection.

I will be posting this in here, and maybe in my Friendster account and possibly other places where I hope it can be seen by many – including P.L.D.T.-D.S.L.'s service-connecting and maintaining people.

I shouldn’t even need to do these things – yet, in a city where the reality of service seems to still be borne more from marketing hype than technical delivery of what was agreed upon, we consumers need to be able to find alternate means to get our gripes across.

If this cannot be solved due to reasons they would be embarrassed to mention, then they should at least allow us to get out of said 2-year contract – without our suffering any legal repercussions, especially since it was them that did not meet the service contract specifications.

We should be allowed to try other services – as we seek the better service that a more conscientious service provider may be able to offer us.

But this begs the question : Is there a better (in terms of service availability) and more conscientious Internet Service Provider we can possibly find?