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So, if you've been following along, you'll remember that the villain of the last piece, Smart Telecommunications — wait, let me try that again — \"Smart\" Telecommunications, have a sub-standard internet service. I also have my mobile phone account with them, which could come under the category of having all your eggs in one basket.<\/p>\n
3G, doesn't work. That's pretty much it. For the first three months I was here, whenever I was at home, I couldn't make or receive calls, or send or receive SMS. If I stepped out of the building and into a different cell zone, everything was usually dandy, but at home, where I spend most of my time, nothing. I spent two months complaining several times a week at their office and over the phone. However both these approaches were fraught with difficulty – in their offices the 3G signal was perfect, of course, and to complain from home … well its pretty hard if your phone doesn't work. My girlfriend's phone (also a Smart subscription) also didn't work in my apartment despite both phones having a 5-bar signal.<\/p>\n
Eventually they'd start to acknowledge that perhaps there might be a problem. I could have worked around it by simply turning off my 3G signal, but unfortunately my phone is one which will auto-switch to a 3G network if it sees one. They sent me to Sony Ericsson to get the firmware upgraded to the latest version, which I did. Unfortunately for SE, just before I paid the P 600 fee for this, I asked what the latest version of firmware was. They checked my phone, and told me \"Whoops, you're already running the latest version\" Well at least I saved myself P 600.<\/p>\n
So things did actually improve eventually. I don't know what they did, but now I can send and receive messages and calls most of the time. There are still areas in Manila where I go through a bad patch, and my girlfriend has taken to carrying two phones — a spare with a Globe connection — for those times when she has no signal. However its hard to determine when this is, as the phone will happily report a full signal while refusing all calls.<\/p>\n
Broken. Am I beginning to sound like a whinger? I haven't started yet …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, if you've been following along, you'll remember that the villain of the last piece, Smart Telecommunications — wait, let me try that again — \"Smart\" Telecommunications, have a sub-standard internet service. I also have my mobile phone account with them, which could come under the category of having all your eggs in one basket. … 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-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philippines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","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=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}