The entire week, an old friend of mine had been complaining about Smart Wifi’s very high latency and frequent slow downs. Yesterday, my classmate was ranting about his frustrating experience on his PLDT MyDSL plan 999 subscription. Meanwhile, I am experiencing intermittent connection on my MyDSL plan 1995. Lame isn’t it? I may continue ranting about PLDT’s bad reputation but it won’t help the situation.
Several weeks ago, PLDT announced their new wireless internet service called MyDSL-W (wifi / wireless). It’s uncunningly similar to Smart Wifi, albeit sugarcoated with MyDSL branding. In fact it uses the same facilities of its predecessors — there’s an external antenna pointed at the nearest cell site and an indoor subscriber unit (SU) which connects the antenna and PC together. This setup had been used since Meridian.
Meridian wireless internet earned a bad reputation not only for bad customer support, but also for its bad performance that would flactuate from one geographical location to another. Some customers where satisfied, while some customers have gone at their wits end just to make their connection stable. It seems that Meridian customers were the guinea pigs in this wireless internet offering, and when the service was rebranded to Smart Wifi, there’s still a number of people experiencing the problems that plagued Meridian. Hopefully, these problems were already solved in its latest reincarnation.
The new MyDSL-W packages offer faster speed than its Smart Wifi counterpart. Off course, it’s also more expensive. Initially, the plans for home subscriber are: Plan 999 – 256kbps; Plan1995 – 512kbps; and Plan 3000 – 1mbps. For SMEs: SME Micro Plan- 512kbps – Php 3,300 and SME Small Biz – 768 Kbps – Php 4,400.00.
Now, I asked myself why they named it ridiculously as MyDSL-Wireless whereas DSL is a wired WAN physical layer standard! The most obvious reason is marketing. Some people think that DSL is synonymous to broadband, which is wrong! I understand that PLDT wants to capture the provincial market with MyDSL-W but to name a wireless service “DSL” is quite insulting to knowledgeable users.
What’s your opinion?
Links:
http://www.pldtdsl.com
https://www.mypad.net/dslw/index.asp