Thursday, May 10, 2007

Case Closed

I'm pleased beyond words to report that my phone is back up and working! Woohoohoo!

[Note: Unlike my first three entries on this topic, this entry includes a second-hand account since I wasn't at home when the repair was done.]

A service crew from BayanTel arrived on the morning of May 9 (Wed) and in hardly no time at all discovered that one of the PLDT phone cables leading into our house's cable conduit was disconnected. Apparently, that happened by accident when the first crew came to install the DSL line. All they had to do today was reconnect that wire to our conduit and our phone service was restored -- all without affecting the DSL service too.

When I think of how easily the problem was fixed, I can only shake my head and wonder why it had to take 11 days and be so emotionally upsetting for me to get someone out here and fix the darned thing.

I'm also wondering if it will be worth my while to write the head of customer service to tell her about my experience, and enclose links to the related entries on this blog so they can review their customer service setup in light of my experience.

Will they be upset to learn that this story played out in such a public forum? Will they appreciate getting the feedback and re-examine their processes? Or will they not care at all and consider it a waste of time to look into this, now that the case is closed?

It might be worth writing them just to find out what will happen. ;-)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

HAHA. hey mate. i just getting Bayantel installed in the olongapo area, so thats provincial, little bit different here, they just ran an entire new cable from their office to my office along the rest of lines on the street. so i have it all installed, but not setup cos i was not here at the time. and being public holidays now i am not going to get it for a few days. i had similar problem with trying to get an email address with the SMARTBRO service, customer service here is lots of yes sir, ok sir, and no actual listening. well hope ur happy with ur internet their. its nice and cheap in the manila area, 2000 peso a month for what i pay 9000 peso a month for. oh well. the joys of the province.

m said...

Whoa! P9k a month? That's Expensive! (with a capital E! Haha!)

My connection is okay so far. On some days it crawls, on other days it's fast. I guess it depends on what my neighbors are doing (someone out here must be on BitTorrent a lot! LOL).

One nice thing about their customer service, though -- there's always someone manning the phone, even when I call at 2am.

Hope your connection works out okay, especially for the money you're paying. And thanks for visiting.

Anonymous said...

Yeah it is really nice and fast. especially the upload. because that is what i use it for mostly. it gets 1.5mb download and about 600 upload.
go to www.speedtest.net and it will allow you to speed test a local server, the actual bayantel server in queszon city. should come up as the yellow pyramid.

and yes expensive. but that was the cheapest option here. others were looking at charging around the p15k a month, which i could not understand... i even looked at bidirectional sattelite, as i heard it was expensive to setup but cheap to run. well not really... maybe if u were running an ISP business. anyways.
i'm currently trying to work out how to log in to my modem to forward the port. but bayantel cant give me the ip address for the login and 192.168.1.1 is not working.

have a great day hey.

Yan

m said...

Hi Yan.

Yes, I get fairly good data transfer rates with speedtest.net when I connect to the BayanTel server in QC; close enough to my subscription package.

But my connect rates to outside the country have been terrible lately. I'm hoping it's just temporary.

Sorry to hear that you're having trouble with the modem. I'm really a newbie myself when it comes to setting up networks, so I hope you'll find the help you need to fix it up.