Monday, March 14, 2011

Bad internet connection quality is unhappy internet

I hate poor service. Heck, anyone would hate poor service, especially
when it's paid for. And my current wireless carrier of choice in this
country, Globe Telecom, just about pisses me off too much now in the
last 2 months.

You're probably wondering why I'm even sticking with them despite the
shoddy service. I may not be from this country, but I've observed
enough that slow speeds = hell of a time. I've experienced Dial-up
(har har), DSl, and finally 3G internet. I can tell you now, Dial-up
is hella slow, DSL looks as if Dial-up has 2 legs instead of 1, and 3G
internet here gives just about a decent price for the speed (1Mbps).
But dude, isn't there other carriers? Why Globe? Well, there's lots of
factors involved, such as not from this country = prepaid, and then
there's signal quality, and then finally speeds. When it comes top
speeds, Globe gave 1Mbps connections, and since I have full bars on
the signal strength with a 3G modem, no brainer on my choice, right?
The problem starts with how the service is handled. Sure it may be
fast, but the first obstacle is the ridiculous 800MB data cap per day.
800MB? With todays anime out there, that's just about 2 720p's, about
5 480p's, but what the hell when browsing todays websites and their
over 1MB content, I swear Engadget.com would push that, not to mention
sankakucomplex, which is just about driven by images. That's also a
part of the reason why I rarely post on my blog via the editor, most
of my posts are emailed to it. But the part I'm very unhappy with, it
sets me back on my anime viewing, and while it may look like the data
cap is what's pissing me off, it's actually the quality of the line.
For about 2 months now they've been doing something to their network,
fixing it or breaking it I have no bleeding idea what, and that's what
pisses me off. They don't tell you jack, they regularly spam you with
spam text, but they never not bloody once have they notified you that
they are performing maintenance on their service or whatever. It
pisses me off that the connection is sometimes reliable, but mostly
shoddy. I even had an ROM upload for the Palm Treo750 cut off because
the terms of the bandwidth cap changes as much as the climate does,
and there was one moment when they didn't count my uploads, and yet
they counted the one for the Treo.

Why not use another wireless carrier? The other choice, Smart
Communications, get's full signal strength, but it's slow. Enough to
make DSL look like a joke, but since I can't sign up for DSL (not from
this country, what I sampled earlier in this post was at the hotel),
Smart sounds like a good idea when it comes to no data cap, right?
Well, the trick to Globe is, the 800 cap is only for a day, meaning
once midnight hits, it resets. But there's the double-edge sword, see.
Globe is fast, has a cap, but at the moment stinkin service. Smart is
slow, no data cap, but hell if I know it you need to be lucky your
downloads even finish, because at this moment, both carriers are going
to cut you off whenever they want, and I've had that happen many
times, and it's worse when it's a large file, and either on Globe, you
pretty much reached your cap, or on Smart, you need tp spend half a
day again. So why I chose Globe, is because if it's just a 10MB
download, I'd rather it take 1 minute lowering the chance of cutting
off, than Smart and their 15 minute download with a high chance of cut
off.

By the way, even DSL is a rip. Somewhere north of almost $30 a month
for an unreliable not-really-1Mbps speed. I got better than that in
the USA for $20, but still out of reach because you practically need
to be a citizen here. I should note Torrent is absolutely crippled on
3G internet services, and nothing but bad stories on DSL.

In the end, I'm biding my time, waiting for the perfect time to strike
(connect).

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous11:37 AM

    $30 a month
    for an unreliable not-really-1Mbps speed?... woa, my unlimited bandwidth 1Mbps connection cost only... $2 per month.

    ReplyDelete