06.25.2008
22:48
My room
I’d so much want to rave with my new acquisition(s) and how wonderfully productive my day went but über poor performance from our network service provider forces me to rant instead. For the past 3 days, we’ve failed to connect once again to the net. This happening after a 3-day none connection just the previous week! Yeah… 2 weeks in a row… can you believe it? Right when school just started. Here’s what happened…
Last week, I tried to connect to the internet to check my mail but failed to even after I’ve reset our router. (Nope, the router isn’t the problem because the status says so and we tried connecting directly. It’s not my notebook either since Steph and Jas couldn’t connect with their notebooks as well.) As confirmed by my sister, it has been down since the day before. I called up SMARTBRO’s customer service Saturday morning when we still couldn’t connect to the net. We’ve experienced this kind of problem before and I knew that it would take some time to perform the troubleshooting and having the location of the phone which was at the living room and the network connection (wirings) at my sister’s room far apart, I tried to do the troubleshooting with the connection via router. Initially, the service rep insisted that we connect directly to the cable. They were trying to imply that the problem was with the router connection. Okay, sure… I understand that they were trying to isolate the cause of the problem so with scepticism, I obliged. To make things less tedious, I stationed myself at the living room. I was the one going to talk the customer rep while Ares was stationed at Steph’s room where he’ll execute the instructions I’d be shouting to him and so the 45-minute troubleshooting commenced…
We started out with checking what they call the base server. It’s usually the first thing they do to check if their server is down or not. It takes about 3 to 5 minutes to check this. According to the customer rep, the base server was up at that time and we have to check our connection. We were asked to check the ip settings, have it rebooted, check the ip settings again, try to connect to the net, tell him what it says, log in again…. Wait… wait… unplug, re-plug, check ip settings…. Blah.. blah.. blah… and after 45 minutes of going around the merry-go-round and assuring us that the base server was up and we did the initial troubleshoot to no success, he finally booked us up for a visit from the tech guys. We were scheduled to be visited on Monday but the tech people arrived on Sunday. Good thing my sister was there to look over things. According to the tech guys, there was no problem with our “physical connection”. The problem, they said, was at the base station… huh? WTF! (Excuse me) We spent 45 minutes of shout troubleshooting only to find out that the problem was with the base server! I didn’t get back to them on that… for me, as long as we could connect again, no problem!
Then, the weekend came. With Frank (signal no 3 storm) gushing its winds and none stop rain, it wasn’t a wonder that we couldn’t connect to the internet. Besides, tv cable was down plus several occasions of brownouts. But when electricity finally stabilized and we could again surf through Arirang… we expected that the internet connection would too be up. But nooooooo! We tried to connect directly, re-boot and re-pug.. nada… no connection! I was feeling terrible last night and went home quite early only to find my sister just coming home from the internet café because she had to do some research.
Once again, I called up their customer support to make a report. I’ve waited for 10 minutes... enough for me to be pis*ed (excuse me again) in addition to the annoyance I was feeling for the loss of connection and my pestering headache. When I reported that we couldn’t connect to the internet… it was like deja vu! I was once again being asked to execute the gruelling troubleshooting process!!! I was to irate to give in this time and I had to tell the unsympathetic customer rep that I wanted to terminate their services and transfer to another provider that can assure us of a better connection… to which he lamely replied a superficial “We’re sorry for the inconvenience but you can visit any of our SMART outlets to terminate our services..” Those weren’t his exact words but it’s pretty tantamount to that.
Being in a service oriented industry myself, it’s a no brainer that the no. 1 product that we sell is SERVICE! It is being instilled in us time and again that the client and his needs should come before pretty much anything. SMARTBRO has to do something about how they do things. I know at the end of the month, I’d still be collected the same amount for subscription fee… for poor internet service… boo! I wouldn’t want to call their customer service hotline ever again… they make me feel unimportant and my concerns petty… for poor customer service.. boo! With that, I have resolved that I really will terminate my services with SMARTBRO and hopefully, I can find a better network provider that can deliver what they assure their clients… efficient service!
22:48
My room
I’d so much want to rave with my new acquisition(s) and how wonderfully productive my day went but über poor performance from our network service provider forces me to rant instead. For the past 3 days, we’ve failed to connect once again to the net. This happening after a 3-day none connection just the previous week! Yeah… 2 weeks in a row… can you believe it? Right when school just started. Here’s what happened…
Last week, I tried to connect to the internet to check my mail but failed to even after I’ve reset our router. (Nope, the router isn’t the problem because the status says so and we tried connecting directly. It’s not my notebook either since Steph and Jas couldn’t connect with their notebooks as well.) As confirmed by my sister, it has been down since the day before. I called up SMARTBRO’s customer service Saturday morning when we still couldn’t connect to the net. We’ve experienced this kind of problem before and I knew that it would take some time to perform the troubleshooting and having the location of the phone which was at the living room and the network connection (wirings) at my sister’s room far apart, I tried to do the troubleshooting with the connection via router. Initially, the service rep insisted that we connect directly to the cable. They were trying to imply that the problem was with the router connection. Okay, sure… I understand that they were trying to isolate the cause of the problem so with scepticism, I obliged. To make things less tedious, I stationed myself at the living room. I was the one going to talk the customer rep while Ares was stationed at Steph’s room where he’ll execute the instructions I’d be shouting to him and so the 45-minute troubleshooting commenced…
We started out with checking what they call the base server. It’s usually the first thing they do to check if their server is down or not. It takes about 3 to 5 minutes to check this. According to the customer rep, the base server was up at that time and we have to check our connection. We were asked to check the ip settings, have it rebooted, check the ip settings again, try to connect to the net, tell him what it says, log in again…. Wait… wait… unplug, re-plug, check ip settings…. Blah.. blah.. blah… and after 45 minutes of going around the merry-go-round and assuring us that the base server was up and we did the initial troubleshoot to no success, he finally booked us up for a visit from the tech guys. We were scheduled to be visited on Monday but the tech people arrived on Sunday. Good thing my sister was there to look over things. According to the tech guys, there was no problem with our “physical connection”. The problem, they said, was at the base station… huh? WTF! (Excuse me) We spent 45 minutes of shout troubleshooting only to find out that the problem was with the base server! I didn’t get back to them on that… for me, as long as we could connect again, no problem!
Then, the weekend came. With Frank (signal no 3 storm) gushing its winds and none stop rain, it wasn’t a wonder that we couldn’t connect to the internet. Besides, tv cable was down plus several occasions of brownouts. But when electricity finally stabilized and we could again surf through Arirang… we expected that the internet connection would too be up. But nooooooo! We tried to connect directly, re-boot and re-pug.. nada… no connection! I was feeling terrible last night and went home quite early only to find my sister just coming home from the internet café because she had to do some research.
Once again, I called up their customer support to make a report. I’ve waited for 10 minutes... enough for me to be pis*ed (excuse me again) in addition to the annoyance I was feeling for the loss of connection and my pestering headache. When I reported that we couldn’t connect to the internet… it was like deja vu! I was once again being asked to execute the gruelling troubleshooting process!!! I was to irate to give in this time and I had to tell the unsympathetic customer rep that I wanted to terminate their services and transfer to another provider that can assure us of a better connection… to which he lamely replied a superficial “We’re sorry for the inconvenience but you can visit any of our SMART outlets to terminate our services..” Those weren’t his exact words but it’s pretty tantamount to that.
Being in a service oriented industry myself, it’s a no brainer that the no. 1 product that we sell is SERVICE! It is being instilled in us time and again that the client and his needs should come before pretty much anything. SMARTBRO has to do something about how they do things. I know at the end of the month, I’d still be collected the same amount for subscription fee… for poor internet service… boo! I wouldn’t want to call their customer service hotline ever again… they make me feel unimportant and my concerns petty… for poor customer service.. boo! With that, I have resolved that I really will terminate my services with SMARTBRO and hopefully, I can find a better network provider that can deliver what they assure their clients… efficient service!
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