Enough is enough....

After eleven days of following up on my PLDT myDSL account's sluggish performance, I've finally had enough. I'm lodging a complaint with the DTI tomorrow morning.

What got my goat was their insistence that the problem was due to a network problem in our area. Imagine my annoyance when it turns out that my sister's DSL account was performing within 90% of her supposed allocated bandwidth, and it has been performing that way for the past several weeks now. Me? I'm stuck at less than a third of the bandwidth that I should be getting, and that's almost for the past two weeks.

Network problem? Network problem my a**.

That was the standard reason they gave my sister when she was having similarly sluggish service not so long ago. At the time I was getting about 430 kbps, which is significantly faster than what she was getting (but still way, way below the promised 768 kbps). After getting an earful from her, her service finally stabilized. Good for her. The service I'm getting nowadays is just plain crap.

It all started after I downgraded my DSL account without paying the downgrade fee of P5,000.00, which I requested that they waive (see previous post here).

Since that time my bandwidth allocation has went down from somewhere in the 160-180 kbps range. The last time I checked, it went even further down, in the 130s. There are even times that it goes below a hundred.

Does PLDT have a standing policy of giving subscribers who downgraded their accounts without paying a downgrade fee a hard time? I don't know, but it somehow feels that way.

And I'm getting really suspicious of the 172 hotline. Most of the time the customer service representives don't know squat why their service sucks. Basically, all they do is forward requests, and listen to irate subscribers like myself. They hardly have any coordination with their technical departments, or billing departments for that matter. The last customer service representative I ranted to told me that they themselves hardly get any feedback from their technical departments regarding the problems they forward.

But most of all, I hate it when they downright just lie. I find it downright insulting that they tell me that my area has a network problem, when my other siblings, my sister, and my brother who's also a subscriber, are getting acceptable service. Are they isolating my account for some reason?

There was this one time that they asked me to leave my ADSL modem on, so that they could remote test it. This was last week. I'm not even sure if they actually did that. All I know is that I'm still getting crappy service. There was this other time that a customer service representative called me up early in the afternoon to tell me that my account has been adjusted. I checked, and no, it was still stuck at the same slow speed. And there was even a time that they claimed that my slow speed is because of the fact that my downgrade request hasn't been properly posted on their system yet. This really made my blood boil, since if my account hadn't been downgraded yet since it hadn't been posted on their system yet, then why the hell did they lower my bandwidth?

To add insult to injury, they advised me to call the 171 hotline first to follow up on that service request, them to call them back at the 172 customer service line. For God's sakes, these people aren't even coordinated.

The bottomline is that they have been giving me all sorts of reasons and explanations, all of which are just full of holes and serve as indicators at how lousy their service is.

Frankly, I'm just getting tired of PLDT giving me the runaround. What's even more annoying is that they expect me to pay the full amount of P999 when they're only giving me 30-40% of the bandwidth I'm entitled to. Shouldn't I have a rebate or something? Maybe I oughta just pay them 30-40% of the P999 monthly fee as well.

Oh well. Even if I file a complaint with the DTI, I strongly doubt it if I would be the first. But I'll do it anyway.

After that maybe with the NTC...

There's nothing worse for business than a dissatisfied customer with a lot of time (well, not that much time) on his hands.

And if you're looking for broadband service, avoid PLDT myDSL like the plague. Your sanity will thank you for it.

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