PISOlutions sucks

Our first broadband service was MyDSL's Plan 1995 which we paid two-thousand plus pesos every month. The initial few months of service was bad and I gave them hell because of that. Eventually, the service improved and things went well albeit some intermittent hiccups.

After more than a year of subscription however, my brother decided that the fee was becoming too burdensome. We decided to downgrade to Plan 995 but there was a problem. PLDT was asking us to pay five-thousand pesos as a downgrade fee. WTF?!? That's simply idiotic. What a rip-off!

So instead of paying five-thousand pesos we opted to have the DSL subscription canceled and looked for another broadband service.

To make things clear broadband in Davao is not what other countries might think of as broadband. As fas as I know, the fastest residential plan anybody can get here in Davao is a download speed of 1Mbps. One Mbps is of course not the actual speed. Our previous plan with PLDT was supposed to be 512kbps but on average I can only get 250kbps.

The most affordable broadband service being offered here are those plans that cost between 799 to 995 pesos but that's without VAT. The speed offered on these plans are usually at 384kbps. Among the available services we took PISOlutions Plan 995 simply because my brother knows the owner of the company. The advertised speed is 384kbps but we all know that just a pile of bovine manure.

I asked the guy installing the modem how long was their longest downtime. He said that the longest downtime they had was 24 hours. Oookay. I followed that up with how often will I expect these downtimes occur.

'Well, on average we have 30 per month.'

U-huh. That bodes well. He quickly backtracked realizing what he had just said.

'That's just on average. We don't get downtimes that last 24 hours all the time. Sometimes we get 6-8 hours downtime only.'

I see. That makes me feel so much better. I wanted to give them the benefit of a doubt. I really did. But knowing that this is a Filipino company ran by someone from Davao, I simply did not want to keep my hopes up.

I was right.

It's been almost a month now and this broadband service is terrible.

Signal comes and goes. Downloading is a very big pain in the ass. I can't even expect to download podcasts in one try anymore. Pair that with iTunes's inability to resume downloads. I'm even reluctant to post my blogs since the service is so testy. Using Globequest's bandwidth meter I get results that flactuates between 31 to 221 kbps in a two-minute testing period. This goes to show the unreliability of this service.

So if anybody is thinking of subscribing to PISOlutions, be prepared to be disappointed. I wish there was a better alternative but I doubt it. PLDT, Globe and other providers have consumers by their throats because they know consumers' rights are not important here.