One week ago today, around 4am, my P1 died. Thinking it was just a glitch, I left it at that in the morning. When I got home later that night, I called up tech support after seeing that the connection wasn’t stable (the modem light was blinking red- a sure sign that it wasn’t getting a signal from the base station).

Relocating the modem, giving it a hard reset, and other troubleshooting methods didn’t work. Neither was calling the hotline, which seemed to be perpetually busy (P1, you might want to consider opening your tech support lines longer).

I left it till Wednesday, when I took the modem back down to P1 to be exchanged, suspecting it could be faulty. There, I was informed by Deva (I think that was his name, says so on the plate) that the modem was working fine, and the main reason for me not getting a signal was that my house was not in the coverage zone.

However, after I mentioned that the firmware could have been the issue, he changed the modem for me anyway and told me I could try it again in one hour. I left it for two hours and tried around midnight. No dice.

On Thurs, I couldn’t get through. On Friday, I called up tech support again and got my case referred to the tech department. Saturday I didn’t call as I was too busy running around for Iluna’s party and getting some stuff done.

So I only did a followup on Sunday morning, where the second-level tech department called me about 2 hours after I made a complaint to their frontliner that I had been promised a call within 24 hours (meaning Saturday evening at the latest) and there had been no call.

According to the second-level, my modem for some weird reason was trying to call the Jalan Thamby Abdullah base station somewhere in KL instead of the base station near my house in Petaling Jaya. WTF. -_- She advised me to take the modem back to P1 (and kept insisting on that) for them to check and upgrade the firmware.

Ok, fine, I do that.

It took about 15-20 minutes for them to upgrade the firmware at P1, and it seemed that my modem was working fine (it showed the green light) and was steady when we tested it twice that I took it home.

I got home only a few hours later because I went to church and had lunch first and when I plugged it in…

IT WAS STILL BLINKING RED. WTFISH IS THIS.

Moving it around did nothing, so it was time again for another call to the P1 helpline. According to Samuel, I needed to leave the modem on for 48 hours straight as apparently my modem was still getting instructions from the base station. To say that I am pissed off is a major understatement.

And it’s 48 hours straight! That means I have to leave the modem plugged in even when I’m away for work. -_-” He also said that I have to leave it on when it’s blinking red, and it *should* stabilise within that time.

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If I do not get my connection back by this Wednesday, 25 March 2009, 7AM, I am returning the modem, cancelling my account, and refusing to pay the penalty charges. There is no reason for me to lose a COMPLETE signal after enjoying it for little more than 3 months.

When you consider that the current CEO of P1 is Michael Lai, he of the “TM-Nut-Begins-Screwing-Its-Customers-over-by-managing-BT-traffic-and-penalising-people-who-download-large-files” era, it makes a LOT of sense why my torrent speeds suddenly dropped and it felt like I was going back to TMnut again.