Internet woe's.

wow you got ripped, my Globe cost P1,300 a month with land line phone for 2gb, you have to report the problem and ask for the rebate.

 

I'm surprised I haven't heard more people complain about this. I have been in the Philippines for 5 years and I have had this same problem the entire time with multiple providers. Certain sites don't load, some sites will load okay and then won't load after a refresh, it's a constant problem.

For me, the issue has been crap DNS. Perhaps the internet powers are just horrible at configuring their DNS servers. Perhaps whatever the providers have to use for filtering Filipino porn sites gets in the way. I don't know.

So, there are two ways that I have been able to get around this issue. One way is to use an alternate DNS provider and the other way is the use a proxy. There have been other threads in this forum covering proxies (for viewing sites which only accept traffic from certain countries,) so I won't get into that.

For DNS hosting, I use the public DNS service from Google.

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/

To use this, you can either set the DNS at your computer or at your router. The ability to set it at your router depends on the make and model. For example, I have a WIMAX (wireless) modem from Globe which goes to a wifi router. I can set the DNS at my wifi router, but not at my modem. You may have a modem which has the capability built in though.

If you have to set this on your computer, then you will have to Google your OS. I have a Linux system and I haven't used Windows in ages. On my system I have to get the IP address automatically (DHCP) and then manually set the DNS (overriding the DNS settings I got from the DHCP.) You may have to do something similar on Windows and Mac.

If you find your connection working great for a while and then reverting back to the same behavior, then check your DNS settings again. You might have done something to inadvertently refresh your IP / DNS which would kick out the manually entered settings. You may also have to do this every time you reboot your computer. For this reason, it's more convenient if you can set this at the router level.

While using a different DNS greatly improves my ability to browse, there are still sites that I can't view. This is rare, but if I run into one of these sites then the only fix is to use a proxy service.