I got a Smart Bro plug-it in June and had several problems but all were resolved within a day or two by calling tech support *1888. I live 5 kilometers from Panabo City about an hour or less north of Davao where the signal comes from. I was surprised how good the signal was. When it worked, it worked well. I got tired of buying load so went to the wireless center in Davao and was approved for a postpaid account.
About 6 weeks later the signal or its usability was getting worse quickly. I blamed this on an almost full hard drive and windows vista (3 year old Toshiba laptop). I took the plug-it and the laptop to the wireless center in Davao and it worked fine there! The tech guy also blamed a full hard drive and Vista so I got an external drive and freed up 50 gigs on the C drive, and I bought Win 7. The computer is now working perfectly considering its age but the bad performance of the Smart signal was unchanged.
I had taken the laptop to Panabo and there it also worked fine, this was before the upgrade. So the problem lies in my specific area. I had also suspected I was being punished as a bandwidth hog because I had downloaded a 180 mb file and a 700 mb file right before the problem started. Also there was a huge rain storm so I thought maybe the bay station servicing my home area (less than 2 kilometers north of Lasang, closer to Davao than Panabo) was damaged by the storm. One tech support person says the bay station servicing my area in undergoing enhancements but I don’t believe everything I’m told.
What’s weird about my problem is that the signal strength is good, remember I was happy with my SmartBro connection for 2 months or more or I wouldn’t have gotten a postpaid account, because it locks me into paying for 6 months whether I use it or not. About 95 percent of the time I wasn’t able to connect to this great signal, often 5 bar 3G. Then when it did connect the download rate was still zero, or it would go to one website and stop, or it would pick up my email and then stop, unable to send anything or get any websites. This is with a good signal. But during this time when I took the laptop and plug-it to Panabo or Davao, it worked good.
Two days ago a tech support person was hearing me say that my attorney is a lot closer than the Smart Wireless Center, because I went there already and they passed the buck on to me and I spend lots more money than I wanted to see if I could improve things. She told me to manually switch to a 2G signal, which I did, and then the email and signal stabilized but works so slow I feel I am living in Tibet or the Sahara desert instead of in a suburb of the 2nd largest city in the Philippines and the promises to have a supervisor call me within 24 hours have all been broken, every one.
Compare this to when I first started with SmartBro in June, when I got three phone calls from supervisors over my first issue, wanting to make sure my problem got solved. It makes me suspect that they profile customers according to how new they are, whether they’ve been hooked into a contract, whether they use a lot of bandwidth, whether they are good Catholics, or whatever. I would appreciate any feedback and I will also look into “unlocked 3G/UMTS USB stick” which I have never heard of, but I can’t keep throwing good money after bad. The whole point of this was to keep me home because I was spending too much money going to town to use internet cafes.
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