I would like to tell you a story of my life when i started using SmartBro.

SmartBro gave us a Five(5) days (as i recall) evaluation period and installed the smartbro connection to our house. during those five days, we were glad to have an internet connection at home, there were no frequent disconnection, no lags, downloading a 6mb file took about 30-45 minutes unlike what smartbro promises (384kbps) the download speed went to 56kb./sec but thats ok, im not entirely into downloading files so i let smartbro get away with that one.

so in the first month connection was OK we can connect to the games W/O a problem. on the Second Month started to experience disconnections. when this happens we ping 203.84.191.216 or 10.0.0.1 and we notice a couple of “request timeout” after 10 reply to the ping. this gives us a headache every time we log on to our games or applications on the internet we get disconnected a lot of times. on the third month we had a two (2) days of no connection, we called *1888 they gave some instructions about IP and ping and from the looks of it i think they are trying to diagnose if the problem was in our PC connection at home they were assuming that smartbro connection is fine but in the end of our conversation with that customer care representative it only comes down to “Sir there is a problem with one of our Sub Station they are fixing it ” so i ask them when will the connection resume and they answered “keep on browsing a website to check if connection has resumed”. so basically, calling 1888 is useless cause then you will still have to wait for the connection to resume. bottom line, the problem is with smartbro not with our connection at home.

the following months were even more stressful. Saturdays and Sundays we play offline games because we keep getting a “disconnected to host” (something like that) whenever we ping smartbro’s IP because we are again experiencing disconnections. when ever we click on Repair on the Network Neighborhood Icon on the taskbar windows was unable to repair. we tried calling 1888 again but something i noticed is that the customer care representative, not the same person we called a month or two before, does the same set of instructions for us and after he fails to detect the problem he does the same thing telling me to wait cause he will try to check the connection on something and then talks back at me and says there was a problem with one of our substation and they are fixing it. it seems to me, everything they say is scripted. the funny thing is the other calls we made after that call (when we get another disconnection) the reasons were “there was an earthquake in taiwan” and “may bagyo sa luzon” these reasons i can understand. I am a Computer Database Programmer and somehow i understand how things would work but somehow im quite disappointed with the current technology that smartbro really has and how they brag about it on TV Advertisements.

Today is July 9 2007, we started Smartbro last december 25-30 as Evaluation and officially started it January 1 2007. it has been Four(4) days since we last played Online Game Ragnarok Online (MY GOD this game can even run on Dial Up Connection). for four days the connections goes back in and out. for every 10 – 15 ping replies i get with an average time of 42ms per reply and sometimes it jumps to 1342ms, we get a 1-4 request timeouts. Call Customer Care ? ASA pa ako. at this moment i have come to realize why i hear news about Customer Going Wild on the phone , people banging their keyboards when getting mad (poor keyboard by the way, they are not to be blame for this).

so i told my sister why dont we just call SmartBro and have our subscription terminated. we are spending 999 Php per month for nothing at all, thats when she told me SmartBro had us when we signed a 1yr contract for our subscription.

I had to give it to SmartBro company, they really are indeed …. Smart :)
they made a fool out of us, their subscribers, and they got away with it legally.
can you blame me for expecting they would really give us 1yr connection like they said on their promotion? i havent read the contract, if it does say we must pay a total of 1year Connection Bills, then i strongly believe SmartBro has to do its part of the contract , give us the 1year total connection. because when we pay bills, walang labis, walang kulang. we are even thinking about not paying our bills anymore. >_<

right now im thinking about calling not 1888, but the smartbro branch in davao and ask for someone to check us here at home. but then again by the time they get here they will see AHH your connection seems fine, we can browse to Yahoo.com and when they leave it would probably goes back to its putol2x connection. only this time i will ping the IP and i will not close the ping window and show it to them when they get here XD.

Maybe if we pay the 500 peso upgrade on our SmartBro Antenna they would give us a full connection ? :)

Jean Peter Paredes
SmartBro user
Davao City Philippines
Service Reference Number 1010186852

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