pldt: are they cool or what?
if you look at it, a lot of people are trained to look at the faults rather than the merits of something, somewhere or someone. this post was inspired by my broadband internet experience with the top telco company here in the philippines ~ pldt.
last week, pldt was *upgrading* their lines. they were trying to push through with the 2mbps upgrades for the 768kbps users (that’s me!). but of course, such setup requires load testing and a lot of configuring. i guess they were asking, “will our pipeline and servers be able to handle such load from the consumers?”
the good
so they gave it a run last thursday and i got a taste of 2mbps connection ~ which they promised to give me a good two months ago. so, my 80 kilobytes per sec was upped to 200 kbytes/sec. if we translate it to the metric system, my 200mb per hour download tripled into roughly 600mb per hour!
*azureus statistics were crammed to make it fit the width of the page
the bad
only to take it away for the whole weekend and my 768kbps connection to boot. i’m pretty much surfing the net as if i were in dial-up but worse ~ some pages don’t even load at all after waiting forever. talk about retribution for maxing out pldt’s service.
as i thought about it, maybe it will be out for the weekend to make way for the businesses who need the internet more than the home users. i don’t mind waiting, weekend’s the time for relaxation anyway.
however, it’s already monday and i still can’t get a decent ftp connection to my different web servers. what the H???!! and oh, getting redundant internet connections from different and several providers is out of the question. that would be very expen$ive.
but i’m not really complaining:
- one weekend does not spoil the entire four years that i’ve been using pldt mydsl (though pldt seems to do this once in a while)
- providing internet for so many people requires a lot of crap to pull together
- one doesn’t really have a choice in the monopoly-driven industry
the ugly
it just got me into reflecting: why do people forget the good things in something - whether it be a relationship, a person, a product, a service, or whatever? why is something bad highly publicized or more noticed rather than what’s good in something? why are there so many blogs about how pldt sux rather than how well they’ve improved over the past few years?
training
i guess it’s all about training. ever since we were kids, society has been training people to look at the bad things in life.
if you go to school, how good you are is dependent on how few mistakes you make ~ rarely on how much good you can do. schools have grading systems that rarely record how well a student performs but it can record how badly a student does perform. every mistake eats away your excellent pristine grade.
if you watch the news, most clips will be about how something *bad* happened elsewhere. *who was responsible for the fire? who murdered el presidente? who stole the pizza pie?* rather than *it was a heroic rescue by the firemen in pink; we could have prevented the assassination if we posted more guards; the stolen pizza must have quenched the hunger of someone out there and that’s alright, as long as it helps*
if you surf the net, most discussions, articles and forums about pldt will be about how lousy their service is rather than how well they’ve been pioneering broadband telco for the past few years. if one would take a look at their history lessons, this state of technology has developed fast considering we just started a few years ago. if one would look over neighboring countries, our country is not really at the bottom of the pile when it comes to the telco industry.
as my father told me, people need to start looking at the good rather than the bad. everything will have their bad points, that’s true, but that’s no reason to focus on it. everything will always have a good side that one must always strive to look at.
yes, even PLDT.
