Carrier Offline!

As I write this post, my mobile phone carrier is offline, and it has been this way since 3:30PM.

Since I operate off Subic Bay, I initially thought that this was an isolated concern, that usually being the case with areas away from the Metro. Not so, as I soon found out as I logged on to the Internet with my laptop and scoured through today’s Twits. Fellow Twitters have reported signal problems all across the country, from Manila to Cebu.

Coming from the Telco industry, I know this is certainly no minor glitch.

My phone, a BlackBerry, has been a very valuable productivity tool for me. I use it for a number of tasks, and this has been the longest I have not been able to make the most use of it during my waking hours. I, in fact, have taken mobile communication for granted. What with the way I use it for email on-the-go, Twitter, Yahoo! messenger, GoogleTalk, browsing and of course, voice and SMS.

When I used to teach College students, I would constantly remind them how much technology has advanced in the past 10 years alone (That was in 2002). In 1992, when the mobile phone was still a thing of luxury, and most people had no access to them, we were forced to arrange meetings way ahead of time, using pre-arranged rendezvous places and precise meeting times. I used to remind them how it felt to wait at the same spot, sometimes for hours, for the person you were supposed to meet, and have no way to reach him except for his last known location, by landline usually. It was such a joy to be able to manipulate schedules on the fly with pagers, and later, text messaging, and to be able to speak to people half-way around the world from practically anywhere. No need to wait for dial tones or go through an operator anymore. I pretty much felt that archaic today. If I were not in Subic Bay, where the landline is still pretty much used as in Manila of 1990, I would have missed a meeting which we had pre-arranged to “txt2 sumtym in d pm”.

It’s now 9:30PM and my service has just been restored….hooray….I really hope this never happens again.

The funny thing is, my alternate line, Sun Cellular, is alive and kickin’!

I wonder if the cause was unavoidable or whether it was caused by poor practice? Could they have been attempting a system upgrade, but did not take the necessary precautions?

Now, the question is: How could my carrier have made this bad situation better for its subscribers? Could they have anticipated this glitch and informed us ahead of time? Or could they have sent an apologetic SMS during bouts of GSM activity?

Bottom line: Let this be the last time.

Update (18Jan2008, 7AM): I have not received any explanation or seen any news article related to this service outage. Talk about customer service. I would at least have expected a poorly concocted tale of force majeure, but alas not a peep.