Lanka Bell times out again.

2008 Nov 12 at 10:09 » Tagged as :broadband, python,

Lankabell broadband is going downhill. Pretty soon they will be worse than dialog broadband. Come to think of it they probably already are. DBN in recent weeks have made significant improvements to their service (more on that later). As for Lanka Bell, I was without internet access for a few hours thanks to my Lanka Bell Wimax connection getting disrupted.

Nov 12 13:09:56 localhost pppoe-connect: PPPoE connection lost; attempting re-connection.
Nov 12 13:10:01 localhost pppd[11306]: pppd 2.4.4 started by root, uid 0
Nov 12 13:10:01 localhost pppd[11306]: Using interface ppp0
Nov 12 13:10:01 localhost pppd[11306]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/pts/1
Nov 12 13:10:32 localhost pppd[11306]: LCP: timeout sending Config-Requests
Nov 12 13:10:32 localhost pppd[11306]: Connection terminated.
Nov 12 13:10:32 localhost pppd[11306]: Modem hangup
Nov 12 13:10:36 localhost pppoe[11309]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Nov 12 13:10:36 localhost pppd[11306]: Exit.
Nov 12 13:10:36 localhost pppoe-connect: PPPoE connection lost; attempting re-connection.
Nov 12 13:10:41 localhost pppd[11337]: pppd 2.4.4 started by root, uid 0
Nov 12 13:10:41 localhost pppd[11337]: Using interface ppp0
Nov 12 13:10:41 localhost pppd[11337]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/pts/1
Nov 12 13:11:12 localhost pppd[11337]: LCP: timeout sending Config-Requests
Nov 12 13:11:12 localhost pppd[11337]: Connection terminated.
Nov 12 13:11:12 localhost pppd[11337]: Modem hangup

Usually whenever there is a disruption, I call up my contact at Lanka bell and he would usually put it right in a matter of minutes. Today being a public holiday, I didn' want to bother him so I decided to go through the normal channels. First I had to get online to find the customer support number. For that I had to rely on Dialog 3g. Except that Dialog 3G doesn't work in my house. If I really want 3g, I need to go upto the roof. So I crawled along with an edge connetion and managed to get to the bell corporate site only to see an error on the contact us page.

The page for broadband has a number listed on it which I called and eventually managed to get through to a loser in the support department. If you have a really low IQ you stand a good chance of joining the Sri Lanka Police or the support staff at Lanka Bell, Dialog, SLT or any bank. The lady who answered my call didn't disapoint me (since I didn't expect to be able to find a solution). She wanted the business registration number (this is a corporate account) which I didn't have it , this is a holiday. She promised to try to help anyway and put me on hold for five minutes (I was lucky, usually they forget you). She got back to me saying she is unable to help without all relevent information. One wonders why databases were invented. But I am willing to bet that Lankabell as well as Dialog and SLT don't even have databases. Their top brass probably think Oracle is a character in the movie Matrix (those who have watched it that is). They would stare at you blankly if you mention mysql. So I was contemplating life without broadband for at least another2 hours and went to have lunch and to play with the kids. Fortunately a few hours later they did restore the service. They have forgotten to restore their site though. In fact now the entire site is inaccessible. The tragedy for Sri Lanka is that we have ISP who cannot even keep their own websites running.