How I Got PTCL to Upgrade my Bandwidth

Sohaib Athar

I, the good cop, mailed a long rant to the PTCL Broadband manager, Mr. Ali Raza Baloch, last week, after getting his email from the helpline.

He forwarded my complaint to a couple of relevant people, asking them to help me out, but that didn't happen.

Meanwhile, a friend, the bad cop, sent a written complaint to PTA – the PTA people wrote a letter to PTCL, and PTCL called my friend, and promised they will upgrade 'tomorrow' – which happened to be a local holiday, so 'tomorrow' never came.

Today, my friend went in person to the Broadband office, spent two hours there, met Ali Raza face-to-face and explained the situation to him. Ali Raza contacted his team, found out that my friend's upgrade was stuck in Islamabad somehow, and got the wheels in motion for him. My friend did manage to get my connection upgraded in the process though – so when I woke up today, I found my modem connected at 510kbps.

So, for anyone who is desperate to get the promised upgrade, you can be proactive and follow the same route instead of waiting for something that PTCL owes you but is reluctant to provide. I'm getting about an 80% throughput – 410kbps or so, which is good enough for jerk-free Youtube, and the upload speed of 300kbps is helping me save a lot of time as well. 20$ for 512kbps is still about 6 times more expensive than the 50$ for 6mbps that my American friends enjoy, but I hope we will get there eventually. Thank god for competition.

10 thoughts on “How I Got PTCL to Upgrade my Bandwidth”

  2. Adnan, speed.net does show the upgraded results, which were 410kbps when I had 5 messengers and utorrent running… will try it again from linux though, I don’t trust the windows background processes.
    What I wanted to say is, ptcl has still not upgraded most of their clients, so you have to go get it done yourself if you have the time to spare. 🙂

  4. Umm… I don’t understand your question infact… maybe we can chat on some messenger?
    When you go to the router homepage (for me it is 192.168.1.1) you see something like:
    Downstream / Upstream (Kbps) 508/509

    Is that what you want?

    I need some caffeine so may have missed your question altogether.

  5. Hmmm, impressive speeds. What speeds do you get on well seeded torrents?

    My speedtests on upload suck, and sometimes download suck too.

    ISP: LINKdotNET. Might as well call it LINKdontNET 😛

  6. Yea, good speed for a puny 512kbps – and I have yet to meet a satisfied link.net or wateen customer in person.
    I’m not really a ‘downloader’ so don’t have any well-seeded torrent to download 🙁 Also, I believe one needs to open up some port on the router to increase the torrent speeds. If you have something to be used as a benchmark, though, feel free to email me and I can try it out.

  7. Here are the speedtest.net images:
    San Jose, USA (Half way around the world, can’t get any farther:

    Germany:

    Seems like they don’t have any download/upload ratio (or whatever the networking guys call it) implemented too – I hear that the other isps have a 2:1 or some such thing set up.

  8. Sohaib, interesting article. I am sure many others would find this useful. May I re-post it at Telecompk.net with you as a guest author?

    Thanks

    BB

  10. dear adnan bai..
    me apne ptcl broadband 512 kbps ko = 1 mbps kese karo upgrade kese karo please ptcl ke senoirs ke email ya loi be procedure muje email kare

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