Friday, February 8, 2013

PLDT Fibr @ Home

After five months of waiting, PLDT finally installed their Fibr fiber Internet-to-home service at our house!  Sheesh!  I don't know exactly why it took them so long to do it.  In fairness to their telesales team though, I have to give them credit for being very persistent in following up with me and the contractor throughout all these months.

I availed of the 8mbps package for P3,500/month.  It comes with one free phone line.  The fiber optic access device comes with two VoIP ports which is mapped to a regular Manila number.  The audio quality is indistinguishable to a regular POTS service.  But I feel (maybe its just my perception) that the post-dial-delay (PDD) is a bit longer compared to regular traditional copper phone service.

When the PLDT installer initially tested the speed, it was maxing out at only 5mbps.  From what I can tell with his conversation with their central network office, PLDT seems to be performing traffic shaping only to set the speed limit based on the subscribed plan.  It does not seem to be a hardware port speed setting typical to traditional DSLAM implementation.

When the PLDT guy performed a ping to "google.com", it gave a 1msec reply time.  Google must have co-located some servers at PLDT.  Otherwise, I cannot think of any other explanation as to how they would have a trans-Pacific latency that low.

Is 8mbps Fibr way that much better than plain ol' MyDSL?  For downloading large files (aka. Torrent), yes, its night and day difference.  But for regular usage for GMail and Facebook, the difference is hardly noticeable.  Even uploading and downloading of GMail attachments do not feel significantly faster.  Of course, YouTube streaming is much smoother now also for Ethan.

4 comments:

Non Voice Only said...

Hi Dick,

Was your speed issue fixed? Thanks!

Dick Chiang said...

Yes, it was resolved. The service is pretty decent. Or maybe its because there are not that many Fibr users yet in our subdivision.

TriDude said...

Thanks for sharing your experience with the installation. Do you know if they have a minimum contract length for this? Or is it possible to do month to month service?

Dick Chiang said...

I don't recall, but I would imagine they do since that seems to be a standard clause for all telco's.