In an effort to entice customers to remain "loyal", Singnet was running a recontract promotion last December with bundles of freebies. Having the desire to get my mother a new PC so that I can reclaim the current old hardware she's using, the 3.5Mbps plan (was previously on 1.5Mbps) with a mini-desktop model seemed like a good deal.
Until I saw that for approximately $5 more I could sign the 10Mbps plan
and get a whooping laptop. A three-year handcuff did not seem like a big "sacrifice".
After all, who else could I really turn to if I wanted vote with my feet? I already did that with Starhub (SCV back then). The dotted line carried my signature.
The day of delivery was a surprisingly smooth one, despite the necessary change in modem-router-wireless hardware to make use of ADSL2 (for 10Mbps) and it's crummy documentation. I refuse to acknowledge that flimsy piece of instruction paper provided with the modem-router a manual - I could barely imagine my family reading it and actually accomplishing anything productive. No matter, I got my entire home network stable and running again fairly quickly, and I was immediately enjoy smooth video streaming rates from Google video. To date the Internet nodes with the widest canal (i.e. MSDN Subscriptions download distributor) have poured data to me between 7-8Mbps.
Nice.
But, that is supposing I am at
home all the time. Being once again a fully-employed developer (I used to be a mercenary), I spend more time outside, and especially in customer sites. More time than I like. An being an IT professional (read: tech saavy), I naturally love to have some means of connecting and access my home network, especially my laptop that is the main repository of my technical communities' communication threads - a
vital source of information I tap on.
And this has been something I've been enjoy since the start of my career. Until
this plan kicked in.
The next day after, I happily stepped back to work at my customer's office, smirking to myself with the glee and giggle of a little girl thinking I'm going to enjoy a better "user experience" with more responsiveness with the extra bandwidth on my end. I connected via RDC as usual, only to find the Windows logon dialog painted halfway before it stopped responding and finally disconnected after a long timeout.
Nice.
My first thought was the router's
firewall was the culprit. The
2Wire Homeportal 2700HG did exhibit an interface and behaviour that immediate distinguished itself as a non-professional firewall/routing system. Oh well, it's catered for the "normal" residential user, and it's
free. What can I demand, right? I was then somewhat pleased to find out later that
the firewall is actually all fine, and it is due to the network(s) the external node is trying to connect from. My customer's network is Starhub; the first person I asked to test also uses Starhub. In fact, anybody with Starhub similary failed to connect to my machine.
Now just in case one begins to think it's a Singnet-Starhub feud, it seems Malaysia's and Canada's ISPs (at least the ones I tried) have no such problem. A friend using Comcast in USA hit the same roadblock though. From within Singnet itself, it would appear to be naturally problem-free.
Despite a number of complaints shot out to Singnet support, they have not responded with anything. Not even a status update on what's happening. The problem persists up to now. Meaning I
still cannot connect from my customer site.
Way to go Singnet. Take your customers' money and drop them into an inaccessible network block. Now (actually, since long ago) I know what the contract is for. To explicit make claim you are going to have
deficiencies in your services and you need to make customers
pay for them.