{"id":1,"date":"2008-02-07T20:10:22","date_gmt":"2008-02-08T04:10:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/?p=1"},"modified":"2019-09-23T10:30:30","modified_gmt":"2019-09-23T02:30:30","slug":"the-internet-is-broken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/the-internet-is-broken\/","title":{"rendered":"Sorry Sir, the Internet is Broken."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I hear the phrase above so often in the Philippines I can barely believe it. Replace the word 'Internet' with almost anything you use in daily life, and there, in a nutshell, is life in Manila.<\/p>\n<p>I should have started this blog a long time ago when I first moved here. At that point I was still incredulous and I would doubtlessly have filled many pages with examples of inefficiency and brokenness in this country. I may still fill in some of the more memorable examples at a later stage, but to kick this blog off, my main beef at the moment is the Internet.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I use a broadband connection by SmartBro. I chose it specifically because I don't have a landline, and because I'm likely to move around a bit during my first few months here. Every broadband plan has a 12 month lock-in, so I figured at least I could take this one with me.<\/p>\n<p>So what do I get for my P1000 a month (USD 25 a month and climbing)?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I get a connection which has a maximum speed of 47kilobyes\/sec, or around 380kilobits\/sec as they market it. This is fine for browsing and email, and should be enough to watch a bit of youtube every now and then. In reality, the connection speed often drops as low as 2 kilobytes\/sec, and as the connection I have seems to be behind a proxy server which drops any connections after 2 mins, streaming video isn't an option. Neither is updating your OS, or downloading files over 3Mb, unless you're a cunning fella, which luckily I am.<\/li>\n<li>I get a little wireless box which sits in my house and connects to an upstream wireless device, eliminating the need for wires, and giving me a degree of mobility. Actually, no I don't. That was just in the advert. As my building is a corporate subscriber, what I actually get is a grey piece of ethernet snaking half way around the flat to my computer. Rather than put in a nice RJ45 socket and give me a cable with an RJ45 plug on each end, they ripped out my phone socket, manually spliced a cable to the wires in there, drilled a hole through the plastic and then stapled the ethernet cable out of the bedroom, underneath the door, along the skirting board, past the <strong>other<\/strong> phone socket (the one they should have used) and over to my computer in the living room. It took a team of three people 2 hours to figure this out.<\/li>\n<li>I get an IP address on a private network, which means I can't connect back to my box from remote locations. Bummer.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, there's the deal. I get internet that doesn't work, which was installed incorrectly, for a mere USD 25 a month. Oh, and we've had a few multiple day outages to boot in the few months I've had it. I've complained regularly (normally around the time I pay my bill), and while the support staff are quite happy to listen to me and log a complaint, the promised call from the tech staff never materialises.<\/p>\n<p>My friends in HK, meanwhile, have 100Mbit\/second connections with HD video for less money. It hurts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I hear the phrase above so often in the Philippines I can barely believe it. Replace the word 'Internet' with almost anything you use in daily life, and there, in a nutshell, is life in Manila. I should have started this blog a long time ago when I first moved here. At that point I &#8230; <a title=\"Sorry Sir, the Internet is Broken.\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/the-internet-is-broken\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Sorry Sir, the Internet is Broken.\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philippines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}