Well, FPT‘s reputation for poor quality service seems to have returned. For many of us who live in the outlying districts of Saigon, getting connected to the Internet has been extremely difficult for the last week. We could surf the web one minute and then get a “Server Not Found” error the next. This problem seems just isolated outside of District 1, 3, 5, and 10. I suspect those with FPT service in South Saigon and An Phu are getting internet access with no problems.
Today I finally got an answer from someone who had a friend who works for FPT on what caused this problem. Seems that last week, there was an outage which resulted in an immediate decrease in capacity of bandwidth (their words) for many FPT customers in Saigon. Most likely one of FPT’s main routers may have went down and now FPT is trying to fix the problem. FPT is currently making some repairs but even today, I still have to restart my modem several times to get back online.
Oddly enough, none of this was mentioned in any of the Vietnamese and English language news sites inside Vietnam (Please tell me if you did hear about this). It does not surprise me. The stock market is very hot in Vietnam so FPT, a company really concerned by it’s stock value, really wants to keep this quiet if they can. They sort of succeeded 🙂
The same bad situation with FPT applies to our house in Phu Nhuan as well. We called FPT for service, and they came out and fiddled around fixing the wire connections in our service jack, and then continued to be mystified why we would continue to have a connection, but could not bring up a web page. So now they are suggesting we need to buy a better modem. Thanks for posting your experience with FPT — this helps to keep things in perspective.