How I Got PTCL to Upgrade my Bandwidth

Mar 22nd, 2008 | Pakistan | 9 Comments

I, the good cop, mailed a long rant to the PTCL Broadband manager, Mr. Ali Raza Baloch, last week, after getting his email from the helpline.

He forwarded my complaint to a couple of relevant people, asking them to help me out, but that didn't happen.

Meanwhile, a friend, the bad cop, sent a written complaint to PTA - the PTA people wrote a letter to PTCL, and PTCL called my friend, and promised they will upgrade 'tomorrow' - which happened to be a local holiday, so 'tomorrow' never came.

Today, my friend went in person to the Broadband office, spent two hours there, met Ali Raza face-to-face and explained the situation to him. Ali Raza contacted his team, found out that my friend's upgrade was stuck in Islamabad somehow, and got the wheels in motion for him. My friend did manage to get my connection upgraded in the process though - so when I woke up today, I found my modem connected at 510kbps.

So, for anyone who is desperate to get the promised upgrade, you can be proactive and follow the same route instead of waiting for something that PTCL owes you but is reluctant to provide. I'm getting about an 80% throughput - 410kbps or so, which is good enough for jerk-free Youtube, and the upload speed of 300kbps is helping me save a lot of time as well. 20$ for 512kbps is still about 6 times more expensive than the 50$ for 6mbps that my American friends enjoy, but I hope we will get there eventually. Thank god for competition.

On the Clueless Ministry of Information Technology Pakistan

Feb 9th, 2008 | Etc, Pakistan | 4 Comments

I originally started this post to share this spanking brand spanking new report on Broadband penetration in Pakistan by our Ministry of Information Technology titled "Is Entire Pakistan Underserved?", and was just going to write something weakly funny about it like "Yes, you bet it is, you could have asked me instead of wasting money on publishing a 39 page report about it"… but here's what went wrong….

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PTCL Triple Play Project

Jan 31st, 2008 | Life, Pakistan | 2 Comments

LESCO, teamed with my local ISP (who gives bandwidth on LAN, and therefore, dies with every one hour power failure) finally made me bite the bullet and move to the PTCL Triple Play Project aka Broadband Pakistan today. The PTCL techs just left after installing the connection (in 10 minutes) and the speed tests so far are not bad at all.

PTCL speed

Contrary to my expectations, I have had a very smooth customer service experience till now. One of the few good things about Broadband Pakistan is that you can get it upgraded and downgraded for free with one phone call, and you will be charged according to your usage. They didn't give me a wifi modem though (they save them for the 1Mbps lines, discriminating 8@$tards!), but told me to call their office after 4-5 days and they will change the modem (I hope they are true to their words). Now I just need to test the one dozen UPSes lying around to find a working one and I'll be a bit less dependent on LESCO.