PLDT – Improvement (a GOOD experience)
After multiple appalling experiences dealing with this national communications company here in the Philippines over the last seven years, I finally have had a pleasing interaction with them, which I would like to relate to you.
My modem was supplied by PLDT, second hand in 2006 and recently became very unreliable. It would crash and would not function correctly, both the LAN and WAN interfaces. After performing some diagnostics, I concluded that it was dying.
I called PLDT and I’m not sure, but I got the impression that he was a little better trained and more knowledgeable than previous PLDT customer service representatives that I’ve dealt with. I explained that I had already diagnosed the problem and that it was the modem. I requested a replacement ASAP. The chap didn’t waste my time, asking me to restart it, restart my computer, reset it, etc. He accepted that I had a request and be it right or wrong, he was willing to comply.
It was 24 hours later that a man turned up at the gate holding a box containing a new router. Four hours would have been better, but at least he came and he had the router.
When I examined the router, it was a “ZyXEL P660HN-T1A”. Not bad at all. It had built in wifi (using the latest 802.11n specification) as well as a four port switch. It worked instantly and perfectly.
They had attempted to lock down the firmware to their slightly crippled version which would not allow you to set a custom SSID (imagine how confusing it could get if all your neighbors have the same SSID of ‘PLDTMyDSL’ and you have to identify yours from a list)! I managed to hack that, upgrade the firmware and have it do all the nice things that my previous router was doing for me.
I’m even saving money by not having to run my super-heated old Cisco router which claimed to be ‘N-spec’ but wasn’t!
Well done PLDT. Who knows, maybe next you will upgrade my DSL speed from the measly 384Kbps to something more deserving of a long-term customer!
November 11th, 2012 at 2:48 pm
Hello,
May I ask how you hacked the modem? I have a different brand – a prolink h5004, but the same lockdown. I called PLDT and what they say is that all they care about is the clients being able to access the internet. They don’t care that anyone can login into our modem with the default password then change the wifi passphrase.
Thanks.