Pros and Cons of PLDT Home Prepaid WiFi

The Pros of PLDT Home Prepaid WIFI

by JJD Peterson

After getting PLDT Home Prepaid Wifi promo, I've been quite satisfied with their service rates, even with two bars of signal. Right now we're utilizing their 'FAMLOAD 199' promo with 24GB of data for 7 days. The normal promo is 12GB, while a 12GB bonus holiday promo carries some extra life into January, which I hope becomes permanent.

However, over the last couple of weeks, I've noticed a bottleneck in the loading process that could alter the user's experience, and even possibly chase away future business.

The Cons of PLDT Home Prepaid WIFI

myPLDT SMART app fails to communicate with the server

For the past two or more weeks of using SMART's PLDT Pre-paid Home WIFI, I've noticed that their app for checking data consumption and registering new Internet promos works half of the time. Many times the Android app gives errors such as "Invalid Phone Number", or "Cannot Reach Server." This becomes very frustrating when you're getting down to the end of your promo plan's time period with many GBs remaining that you hope to roll over with a new promo. As also mentioned by many disappointed users using the myPLDT SMART (link goes to Google Playstore myPLDT SMART app reviews). 

With no Internet access, no promo loading

Once you have no Internet access, the myPLDT SMART app cannot communicate with the server, which means that whatever load you purchased from local vendors cannot be converted to a working Internet promo. I was quickly reminded of this bottleneck today as I was unable to access the myPLDT SMART app because the service was down for an hour plus. My previous plan is counting down and I feared I would lose my current Gigabytes of data. 

Since there's no SMS or dialing functionality in the PLDT router, there is no possibility of registering or converting load to working promo.

Frequent interruptions of service

From time to time, the Internet will drop out. For instance, this morning around 9:08 am, January 31st, 2020, the Internet dropped out for roughly 2  minutes. I rebooted the router in case, but it resumed with the same condition. In such events waiting it out is the only option.

Conclusion

If SMART will address the promo conversation issues mentioned above, I see this service becoming popular. SMART's competitor GLOBE, though appearing to oversell their Internet connections, at least has the right idea for converting load into promos by "Sharing-a-promo" via another phone or tablet, which bypasses the data requirement bottleneck. I certainly hope PLDT will address this issue as per the many reviews mentioned on the Google Play Store.

Other Resources

Getting the most from PLDT