From Dial-up to DSL
During the turn of the millennium, I had my first taste of internet. I don’t really care if my internet connection is slow, as long as I can view sites with reasonable amount of time, it’s fine with me. I don’t care if some of my classmates are enjoying the super fast DSL while I’m on dial-up, scratching the protective coating on the internet cards that I buy every week and waiting for a long time just to connect to the internet.
To me, the slow connection is still bearable. As I’ve wrote, as long as the websites that I visit load with reasonable amount of time, it’s fine with me. I’m not somebody who would go for the faster one if I can tolerate the slower one.
The biggest downside of being on a dial-up connection is that you can’t use the phone. You can’t create an outbound call nor nobody can call you if you’re connected to the internet. For the past years, this really makes my parents irritated. Especially when family relatives from the USA are calling here at our home but can’t connect because I’m busy surfing the internet.
I’ve been a pain in the ass. Yeah. Whatever.
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Late last month, I’ve seen an advertisement of PLDT’s newest DSL service in the newspaper. It’s the Plan 888. I’ve told my dad1 about it. I’m just glad that he agreed. I’ve told my dad about it not because I want a faster internet connection but because I don’t want to be a pain in the ass anymore. He called the effing customer service of PLDT and the customer service representative said that their line man will go to our place within the week. A week has passed and we haven’t received any news from PLDT about our application. So my father decided to ring PLDT again. Whoever spoke to my father don’t know the services that they offer. That person told my father that the Plan 888 isn’t available here in Pampanga yet. How come their advertisements clearly state that it’s already available here and there is even a big billboard of their newest product here? Don’t you call this stupidity?
I decided to forget about it. I thought that PLDT made a big mistake. Two weeks ago, I was surprised when somebody from PLDT called here at our home, asking me if they can install the device that they’re giving so I can start using DSL.
When they went here in our house, they found out that my computer still doesn’t have a LAN card. Curse my old computer for that. Two Sundays ago, I’ve bought LAN card. I let the sales man in the store where I bought it install it at the back of my CPU because I’m too scared to do that work. When I got back to our house, it looked like my computer can’t find the newly installed LAN card. And that’s when I started to troubleshoot my computer alone. Since then, I’ve opened my CPU numerous times just to find out what seems to be the problem.
Monday last week, I had my first taste of DSL here at home. I was online the whole day. But when night came, the DSL connection we have doesn’t like to work. It continued to be like that for about three days. So I was forced to dial 173 (PLDT’s effing customer service) and I found out that our application was not yet activated by that time! 
Last Saturday, miraculously, our DSL connection came to life once again. Dunno if our application was already activated. But until now, I’m enjoying it.
And because of this, I can now enjoy and abuse YouTube (which is now owned by Google). Any short films that you want to recommend? And look at this! This is so cool. The newly released international trailer of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and hey, mind you, it’s not just the teaser trailer.
- Who went to Singapore last week, yeah, off-topic. [↩]
