Tuesday, August 21, 2007

I was upset that Randy and I failed to recite the rosary this evening before he left to work due to Bayantel DSL's Outage of Major International Cable Facilities which started at 9:00 am.

My modem resets its connection at 9:00 am, and that's how my internet nightmare started. Good thing that Skype was working until he logged off to bed at 2:40 pm. I could barely open pages, browser had an error: "The connection has timed out. The server at uc3.gamestotal.com is taking too long to respond." Worst thing happened at 7:00 pm before Randy comes online. I couldn't browse any more and I couldn't logout from UC either to refresh connections. Even messages in Yahoo had delays. But, at least, I was able to let Randy know that internet is not back up yet.

Before giving up waiting for some bandwidth at past 11:00 pm, I tried inquirer.net and my blog's MT Editor. It looks like I can access local sites so I read news while trying to access UC. Unfortunately, while blogging, I accidentally clicked something and next thing I know, when page reloaded, my entry was gone. Anyway, there is something interesting that caught my eyes: British, wife lose P50K in Equitable-PCI’s online banking. In the news, Neil Honeyman and his wife, who reside in Bacolod City, said that P50,000 was fraudulently withdrawn from their bank while making phone banking transaction last August 16. The bank refunded the money but it was not mentioned who did it and which account the money has been transferred.

I have reason to be alarmed. Randy sends his XOOM remittances to my Equitable PCI Bank account and I monitor transactions via FASTNET online.

In December 2006, I had lost Php 10,000 while taking some money from my Equitable PCI Bank ATM, using ChinaBank ATM machine at SM North EDSA. I was charged for unsuccessful transaction. I reported the matter to EPCIB. Then, I followed it up via mobile calls but nothing has happened yet. When Randy was here in Manila, we both dropped by to the bank and made a followup. They only returned/deposited the money into my account after 3 weeks of waiting. Shiela, my daughter's friend, mentioned that her Aunt had a similar ATM experience with EPCIB. Guess my bank have a lot of depositors and cannot handle loads of transactions.

Anyway, I am tired and it looks like Bayantel DSL will not be restored until midnight.... Tech Support did not mention whether it's Asia-Pacific Cable Network (APCN) or GPT, AGC, C2C, SEMEWE3 which caused all Bayantel subscribers internet disruptions.