By: Jerome Auza
Internet service in Tagbilaran city bogged down for several days in Tagbilaran City starting on August 1 crippling several Internet enabled firms and many offices and home users subscribed to PLDT. The service was restored on August 6 in the afternoon.
Auza.Net was one of those Internet enabled firms that was severely affected by the issue. We had put in place a redundancy link to the Internet using Globe. Unfortunately, the line had problems also. There was no dial tone which means there was a cable cut somewhere. So there we were, on Monday morning, trying to find a workaround for our connections.
We had 3G service on some mobile phones so some of the staff used it on Monday while I was scrambling to find a way to get a decent connection. We soon figured out that the PLDT service was down only for some websites like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and most other websites. However, it was operational for Gmail and Google Apps, BPI Online Banking and, luckily for us, on one of our remote servers in the US. So we simply routed our Internet traffic through that remote server in order to be operational again but at a much slower speed.
Other companies were not so lucky. They were totally down and had to resort to 3G service or WiFi from coffee shops that were not affected.
The question I want to ask PLDT is “What took you so long?”
I thought there was multiple redundancy within the PLDT network. I thought there was spare capacity available for immediate use if there are International routes that are congested. I thought we were ready for BPO/KPO operations in Tagbilaran from the telco perspective.
Several hours of downtime is probably a reasonable time to fix a network issue given we are in the Philippines and not in an industrialized country. But six days of downtime is just unacceptable. Even the business accounts that paid a premium for their service were down for just as long.
To be fair, the leased line connections of PLDT were operating normally. PLDT prioritizes these expensive connections for repairs when there are network issues. Large BPO/KPO companies would be using leased lines so they would unlikely experience that much downtime. In addition, this was the first time our connection at Auza.Net was down for an extended period. Usually a router reboot would solve the connection issues we experience once in a while.
Small firms relying on the Internet could be shutdown and lose business if downtimes like this happen often. How can we encourage ICT companies to flourish in Tagbilaran and Bohol if once in a while they will have to endure extended downtimes counted in days? What would our freelancers do to continue providing their services? What will tourists feel when they cannot post their vacation updates because the hotel they stayed in had no Internet the entire time they were there?
But do you know what’s the irony? PLDT didn’t breach its service level agreement (SLA) at all. I actually signed up for “Minimum of 10% of subscribed speed at 80% reliability where available” as stated on the contract. The 20% unreliable period within a month is 6 days.
So the downtime last week is within the SLA.
I think Globe also commits to only 80% reliability. So even if you have connections from both telcos, the chance of both of them being down at the same time is actually quite high at only 80% reliability of each. This actually happened to us last week.
We need to demand much more than 80% reliability of the Internet service we are subscribing. Even worse, this 80% is counted against 24 hours operation. Whichever regulating agency allowed that 80% reliability in the SLA should seriously review it.
Just think: it is actually within SLA that the telco can be down for one day per week. It is within SLA that one cannot use the Internet for one day per week. On a daily basis, it is 4.8 hours. If that 4.8 hours happened during office hours every day it is still within the SLA. I think that is a joke. And I pay for it. Everyone who needs Internet pays for that joke.
