Saturday, January 27, 2007

Wired

i have a confession to make, the past couple of months, i have been making do with a humiliatingly slow connection. yes, dial-up connection still exists and i have been on it since november. it was slow. it was frustrating. it was limiting. "slow and steady wins the race" my bum.

but it was steady. remember the earthquake that cut off the asian region last december? while the rest of asia was plunged into information darkness (the quake knocked down most lines of communication, killing internet and some digital phone connections), i was slowly and steadily crawling my way through cyberspace. the stone-age technology of dial up allowed me to creep into the internet, finding detours in the wrecked fiber-optic thoroughfare.

however, i am not at all sad to let my dial up go. it's time it said goodbye and took a much needed rest. i can once again surf and stay online--- while using my landline. i have missed the landline. yes, people, you can now call me and someone would answer the phone. not because they want to, but because THEY CAN!

of course getting this dsl connectoon was not without troubles. and at this, i shake my fist at the giants in PLDT who offered that crazy smart BRO wireless broadband crap. and yes, it is crap. signal from their smart cellsites is at its best intermittent, often dying on you just when you remember the title of the song you have been trying to download for the past couple of days. the crappy wireless service from PLDT forced me to switch to dial-up before ultimately shopping for a new dsl provider. i found one in BAYANTEL, whose offices is just a stone's throw away from my house. since i already had a bayantel-provided landline, i decided to get the cheapest connection they were offering... and much to my surprise and glee, it even got cheaper since the good people at bayantel bundled the dsl connection with my existing bayantel phoneline. yay to bayantel!

but that was a month ago. it took them a month to finally get around to installing my dsl. i played phone wars with their customer service agents for days to no avail. they said their network was saturated and i had no other choice but to wait while they upgrade in order to accomodate me. at this point, i was already resigned to a lifelong reliance on my dial-up. i already abandoned dreams of dowloading the latest songs from paolo nutini, of seeing the who's who at the upcoming awards shows. and to add insult to injury, i accidentally yanked my television cable from the wall, splitting the cable and sending me into total entertainment news abyss.

i guess everything happens for a reason. the slow dial-up connection gave me time to ruminate and reflect as i wait for a particular webpage to upload. the downtime gave me a chance to clean my laptop keyboard. and the never-ending wait made me appreciate my brand spanking new dsl connection even better. yay! so yes, aside from my daily mmorning caffeine fix, there is now something else that is keeping me wired. see you online! :)

1 comment:

jm said...

Hey, at least you've moved beyond the 'slow and steady' pace of dial-up. :) Am still plodding along unfortunately. It isn't that bad for email and basic browsing. YouTube, video and the downloading of what to me are massive files, is a whole different story however.

Was considering both the Smart Bro service and PLDT's myDSL offering for the house. Was thinking that I'm spending several hundred pesos on prepaid internet cards anyway, every month, so all we'd need to do is tack on another couple hundred, and we could afford higher speed internet. Was turned off though by posts on forums detailing customer service grievances and connection difficulties in relation to both services. Also, there's the whole 1 year lock in period to think about. Hence, the plodding (unfortunately, Bayantel is not an alternative, given where I live).

But anyway, I guess congratulations are in order. :)