Congratulations to my ISP, TM Net, for being the one of the first ISPs in the world to offer phone sex to customers of its ADSL service. They don’t market this service as such but it’s effectively the same thing.

This is how it works: you have a problem with the company’s ADSL service, Streamyx, and call the customer care hotline at which point the company’s customer representatives will proceed to jerk you off over the telephone.

Okay, perhaps not literally.

I’ve been experiencing severely reduced upload rates for the past few weeks. I usually have a maximum upload rate of about 40KB/s but right now I’m restricted to between 3 to 6KB/s. Curiously, my download speeds have not been affected at all. However, downloading via Bittorrent is much slower than usual since download speeds generally commensurate with upload speeds.

My biggest problem, though, is I’m having tremendous trouble uploading to my sites. To update the Tripod mirror of my blog, I have to upload three simple HTML files. Thanks to the sluggish upload rate, this is taking me up to 18 minutes on average because I keep timing out during the FTP process.

I’ve been in contact with four other Streamyx users from Banting and they’ve confirmed they’re experiencing the same thing. I would complain to the TM Net customer hotline but apparently the standard line being fed to customers is that the problem is on the customers’ end. If you insist it isn’t, they’ll send over a technician who’ll admit after a while that the problem is on TM Net’s end — they might even mumble it might have something to do with ports — and then claim it will be resolved.

In two weeks.

Memo to myself: search eBay for needles and voodoo doll likenesses of TM Net personnel.

This might be the last update to the Tripod site until the problem resolves itself. In the meantime, feel free to check out the fuyoh.net mirror since updating it is much less frustrating at the moment.