Tag Archives: Internet

Problems with Converge in Cavite

Converge no internet connection

Just in the second month of having Converge as our primary ISP here in Cavite, we’ve already experienced an outage that lasted almost 12 hours. The following day, the connection was intermittent. The most frustrating of all is how difficult it’s been to contact their Customer Service, regardless of the channel.

I first reported the outage through their official Twitter account, and they responded after 5 hours! Tried to call their hotline and the feature to automatically generate a support ticket failed to work. So I patiently waited for almost 15 minutes to actually speak to someone, but when they were about to create a support ticket for a tech visit, the call got disconnected!

What I feared finally came to pass, it’s really hard and frustrating to get a reliable and responsive ISP outside of the capital.

Globe Broadband vs PLDT FibEr

Daily dose, ,

A month ago today, we finally moved out of the city and back into my hometown of Silang, Cavite. Aside from figuring out where to put all of our stuff in a much bigger house, one of the things I worried greatly about is getting decent fiber internet service.

Back in Taguig, our PLDT Fiber service of almost 7 years has been mostly reliable and fast. Globe wasn’t available in our neighborhood so Converge became a secondary service, a backup that is so crucial for remote work and online classes.

I tried to get our PLDT Fiber service transferred to Cavite but to no surprise, the process became a lengthy ordeal and ended up being abandoned because it turns out that it’s not available in our new address.

Fortunately, my sister has been on Globe Fiber and she told me that the service has been virtually great and reliable for some years now, so we’ve decided to split the bill and upgrade to a faster subscription of 800Mbps to accommodate the additional users and devices we’ve brought with us.

So far, Globe has not been a disappointment. Except for one inconvenience, we cannot ignore, even when there are a couple of us using the network, we’re only getting roughly 400Mbps connection speed. Half of what we are being billed monthly.

We’ve already reported this to Globe and this afternoon, one of their technicians dropped by to check the connections and the modem. He agreed that our connection speed should way above 400Mbps so he escalated it for further investigation. So now, we wait yet again for the issue to be resolved.

The entire experience just reinforced a couple of observations; first, the quality of internet connection varies largely from one area to another, and second, the state of an ISP’s provider in the area will influence the quality of the service.


So this would be my answer to anyone who’d ask ‘Which internet provider is better?’ It depends, literally on where the location is.

Home Network upgrade

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Working from home has been the norm since the pandemic began so having a fast and reliable internet connection has become as important as electricity and running water. Part of improving the home office setup is upgrading the home network in three metrics: redundancy, stability, and improved performance.

For redundancy, I’ve signed up for Converge’s FiberX service as a backup for the primary connection from PLDT. For much of the latter half of 2020, PLDT’s uptime had been really problematic – the connection would go down at least once a month, and worse, it takes more than a week for it to be fixed. Mobile internet wasn’t just enough for our connectivity needs and using a prepaid data connection was too costly.

TP-Link TL-R605 Gigabit Router & load balancer

Having two separate internet connections meant it was time for a load balancer, so I bought a TP-Link TL-R605 SafeStream Gigabit Router. It would also save us from the trouble of manually switching networks whenever either one goes down. It allowed for a near-seamless switch from the 600Mbps PLDT connection to the 300Mbps connection from Converge.

Mercusys Halo H50G WiFi Mesh

Sometime around October last year, I replaced the TP-Link Archer A6 AC1200 with the Mercusys Halo H50G WiFi mesh kit to eliminate dead spots around the house and for better network stability. To complete the upgrade, the existing wired connections were replaced with CAT6 ethernet cables to take full advantage of the Gigabit ports on the load balancer and the WiFi mesh units.

What’s wrong with the existing CAT5 cables that usually come with commercial routers? These cables aren’t really designed to handle network speeds faster than 100Mbps. ISPs today provide modems or routers or a combo box that is future-proof – equipped with Gigabit ports so that they can offer subscription speeds faster than 100Mbps should a customer decides to get an upgrade or give it out sheer generosity.

Switching to CAT6 cables would fix that and allow you to maximize the bandwidth of your subscription especially if it’s above 100Mbps as in my case because the combined speeds of my two connections are above 100Mbps.

The upgrades have been worth the investment as our home network has been more stable and able to let us work, study and stream HD content on multiple devices without worries.

PLDT’s Shady Speed Boost Promo

Daily dose, , ,

Last Sept 2, I was one of the ‘chosen’ subscribers to get the Free 30-day trial of a speed boost that bumped my connection to up to 600 Mbps with an average speed of 480 Mbps, minimum of 180 Mbps with 80% reliability.

After the 30-day trial period, I would be charged an additional P100 every month to keep using the new subscription speed.

At first, it sounded like a fair deal except for two things:

  1. Don’t we have the right to be informed first and consent to have any changes to our subscription? Instead, PLDT unilaterally decided on its own to modify my subscription and then charge me an additional fee.
  2. My internet connection is still nowhere near the supposed average speed of 480 Mbps since I got notified.

I’m not 100% sure, but somehow something wrong has happened and government regulators should look into this scrupulous action taken by PLDT.

Other subscribers have also raised their concerns on social media. To date, there has been no response from PLDT or government regulators about this.

I’ve already raised these concerns to PLDT’s Customer Support team and let’s see how this will pan out.

Concerned Online Citizens vs Executive Secretary et al.

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Last July 29, 2020, Concerned Online Citizens – social media personalities, bloggers, artists, professionals even students who use the internet and social media to speak on issues of public concern in filed a petition to strike down as unconstitutional the Anti-Terror Law.

  • Let’s fight for our rights both online and offline
  • The Bill of Rights should apply everywhere, including the internet
  • Free expression should be protected across frontiers and the media we use
  • There should be no threats and no terrorist-tagging of citizens expressing themselves online and offline
  • 73 million online Filipinos should be protected
  • The people should not be afraid of government. The government should be afraid of its people.
  • Cybercrime Law noon, terror law ngayon
  • Kung walang ginagawang mali, bakit takot ang gobyerno sa placards at Facebook posts

I am humbled and privileged to join some of the biggest names on social media today:
@macoydubs1

@SexbombGurl

@robcham

@victoryliner

@thysz

@markgeronimo_

@ka_bino

@PinoyAkoBlog

@darnitJC

@mongster

@leanporquia

@Punongbayan_

@albertraqueno

@blogie

@TheRainBro

@giasison

& Aling Marie

Below is a fully copy of our petition.

We wish we could have added more, however time & the restrictions of the on-going community quarantine have prevented us from doing so.

Follow & interact with all of each of us, we are eager to hear from you as well especially if you have experienced harassment or being attacked online for speaking up. Together, we will defend and fight for our rights be online or offline.