Broadband Wars: PLDT myDSL

The Philippines isn’t even on the chart! Maybe it’s because the major telco over here is still promoting 384KBPs DSL speeds bundled with their landlines. Maybe if I was in Japan, I wouldn’t mind loosing 1 or 2 MBPs but over here every KB/s is worth fighting for.

I’m not one to rant easily but recent discoveries really have annoyed me. 3 years ago we had our first ever broadband connection - 384KBPs courtesy of SmartBro for about $20/mo. Service was consistent but there could be up to 3 computers using the net at a given time at home so we needed more bandwidth

Towards the end of 2007, we came across PLDT’s offer of ‘up to 1MBPs’ for the same amount of $20/mo. Not to be defensive, but I made every inquiry as to if we were qualified to subscribe to them and every answer was always “YES!”. We subscribed to Xperience.

Speed was consistently (ave and max) at 600 - 650KBPs. I inquired about this several times and was told that the speed we received depended upon many factors like distance from the relay station, # of subscribers in the area, etc. etc. Anyway, the service was also consistent, aside from not ever reaching 1MBPs we had no complaints.

2008. Most telcos now offered ‘up to 1MBPs’ speeds at $20/mo but hey, that’s what we had already… or so we thought.

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