Tag: Globe

Globe restores signal in Tacloban, Smart to follow

Daniel Morial Leave a comment

The country’s leading mobile service providers are keen on restoring their services in Tacloban after the devastation brought by Super Typhoon Yolanda.

When Super Typhoon Yolanda landed on Leyte last Friday, strong winds and flood brought by a strong storm surge caused massive power and communication outage. Even TV networks had a hard time restoring their facilities to bring live feed of the current situation in the region. As for mobile communication, cell sites were knocked down making the city isolated from the rest of the country.

As of writing, Globe was able to bring back partial communication services by having a temporary site within the city. Only 2G signal is available which should be enough to cater text messages (SMS) and phone calls. No video calls and internet services yet. Meanwhile, Smart will have their services restored within 48 hours.

While waiting for the restoration of mobile services for everyone, there are various mobile stations within the region like Smart’s “Libreng Tawag” service at the PLDT office near Tacloban City Hall. Globe will be having “cellsites on wheels” to restore temporary 3G services by Monday, November 12.

Sun subscribers are then encouraged to use the Smart network for improved reception. Just change your preferred operator to Smart. Go to phone settings, select Operator selection, choose Manual, and select SMART. Then return to Automatic mode. According to Sun Cellular, this can be used for call, text and data services.

Let’s all pray and hope for the betterment of the affected areas.

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Globe receives extra $120M funding from Metrobank

Ronnie Bulaong Leave a comment

Yesterday, Metrobank and Globe has formally signed an agreement for a $120M term loan that is said to be used for the telco’s capital expenditures which includes the current network modernization.

Earlier this month, Globe has also sealed a $75M term loan deal with The Bank of Tokyo. In statement made Globe said “The term loan facility with Metrobank brings to $195 million the total loans signed by Globe for the first quarter of the year.”

globe metrobank

“Proceeds of the loan will be used to finance the company’s capital expenditures, which include the ongoing network modernization and transformation program, and investments in fixed line, international cable facilities, and IT infrastructure,” said the telco.

However, $195-miliion is still not going to be enough considering that the company is looking at a capital expenditures amounting to a total of $450M – $500M for this year. Thus expect Globe to tap on other financial institution for additional funding.

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NTC to penalize telcos for not meeting QoS standards

Ronnie Bulaong Leave a comment

So it seems that the National Telecommunications Commission is really serious about bringing the Quality of Service of the two major telcos (Globe Telecom and Smart Communication) at par with their standards, or else they’ll face the wrath of Commissioner Gamaliel Cordoba and his troops.

celltower< Commissioner Cordoba said that they’re currently monitoring the two service providers’ first quarter performance and they plan to release the result come April. If one or both telcos failed to meet NTC’s standards, each company will be given sufficient time to explain to the commission why didn’t pass.

However, if the commission finds their excuse “not meritorious”, the telco will be prohibited from accepting new subscribers until they pull themselves together and meet the standards that NTC has set. Here are the Quality of Service standards that need to adhere to:

• Blocked Calls or Grade of Service – equivalent or less than 4%
• Dropped Call Rate – equivalent or less than 2%
• Average Signal Received Level – minimum acceptable Signal received is -85dBm
• Average Signal Quality – rated from 0 to 4, with the former being the highest
• Call Set-Up Time – less than 14 seconds

Now here’s how both telcos fared during the previous quarter (Q4 2012):

NTC Q4 2012 result

Both these telcos have their work cut out for them. But neither company seemed to be too worried about their upcoming result. In fact, both telcos are confident about their network and thinks that they should be able to meet the standards.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to getting our money’s worth. We liked how NTC is getting their hands dirty by making sure that these telcos are delivering the right service that’s due to their subscribers. We will update you guys once NTC unveils the Q1 results.

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Domain Name Resolution Problems with PLDT and Globe DNS Servers

admin Leave a comment
If you are getting weird problems connecting to the web, and are using PLDT’s or Globe’s DSL service, we may have a stumbled upon a less than optimal DNS entry on our side.  Lately, we have been receiving reports from our hosted clients using PLDT  and Globe internet connection that they cannot view websites.  During the investigation of the problem, we initially thought that there was temporary problem with PLDT’s DNS servers. As out test below would show, some other DNS servers on the Net did not have the same problem. The details of our test show the following: 1. When the client is using PLDT’s DNS server (from DSL),  the DNS query will fail. >www.m*********.com Server:  ns2.i-gate.net Address:  58.69.254.136 *** ns2.i-gate.net can’t find www.m**********.com: Server failed 2. When the client is using OPen DNS server, the DNS query returns a proper answer and succeed. > server 208.67.222.222 >www.m*********.com Non-authoritative answer: Name:    www.m*********.com Address:  202.91.163.2 So we escalated the problem to PLDT’s top network honchos and asked them what they were seeing from their side. It seems that both PLDT and Globe servers could not resolve the IP address of one of the Name Servers on our side. But other name servers on the internet could. While we were troubeshooting the problem, we advised our clients to use OPENDNS when encountering problems that are related to PLDT and Globe DNS server. Here are the instructions on how to change DNS settings to OpenDNS After exhaustive investigation, it seems that our NS records did not have the accompanying A records. (In layman’s terms, it was not fully compatible with some of the DNS servers out there). So we corrected the problem, and with help from PLDT DNS guys,we were able to get confirmation that the DNS servers are now in sync and compatible with PLDT DNS.