My horrible week with FPT

Last Sunday, after our internet was down at my home for nearly 7 days, FPT arrived to resolve the problem.  Somebody cut their line last Monday and it took FPT 5 days to repair it.  They came to our house to make sure all the computers were connected.  The FPT technician came to my room, and tried to get Ubuntu Linux to connect to the ADSL line.  He failed miserably and it was clear he did not have a clue what he was doing.

I decided to be kind to him and handed over my Windows-run EeePC.  That was the dumbest thing I could have done.  He did get it connected to the internet but my three Linux systems could not get connected.  Since all the Windows systems were working in the house, he felt everything was okay so he left.  I was left figuring out what why my computers could not get connected.  Thanks to Tony, it was established that FPT most likely assigned the same IP address for both the wifi access point and modem itself.  When I disabled the NAT option on the wifi access point, I could log into the modem.  Yep, Tony was right.  I changed the IP address for the wifi access point and all my Linux systems could get access to the internet.

Problem solved at home?  Nope.  When I let the FPT guy play with my EeePC, he changed some configurations.  I can no longer access the internet through other wifi or wired connections.  I will have to figure out what he did tomorrow.

Now at work.

At my school, we have had all sorts of problems with FPT.  They could only respond with excuses and many times, I felt they really thought we were stupid.  Even worse, each FPT person they send to us or we meet LIES to us.  One guy even admitted FPT lied to us last year.  Today I asked them to come and get their modem connected to our network.  It was just running as a wifi router and why they never connected it in the first place the last two times I asked them to come to our school, I do not know.   That is FPT for you.

Today they sent another technician, a young guy about 19-20 years of age.  This morning we had a fully functioning network with both wifi and wired internet access.  It took this guy less than 30 minutes to take down the entire network at the school.  Three computers were able to connect to the internet but the rest of the school had problems.  We could not get any wifi access to the internet after he configured the modem.

His response, there was a problem with the modem and we needed to replace it.  Yeah, he thought we were stupid, the modem, which is also our wifi router, worked 30 minutes before and HAD worked the entire time we were with FPT.  Now he said it did not work so I asked him to replace it.  He said he could not since the guarantee was over.  He then tried to explain to our Vietnamese staff on what happened but I told them to ask him to leave.  He was trying to trick us.  He did not know how to fix it.

Later we found out that he also assigned the same IP address to the modem which was being used by one of our wifi routers already.  Still, two hours later, even the three computers that could get internet access no longer were connected.  Our modem could no longer be authenticated by FPT.

Yes, we are trying to cancel our contract based on poor service but FPT keeps telling us we have to pay 18 million VND.  That is ridiculous.

FPT sucks.  I will never choose or recommend this godforsaken company to anyone.  VNPT has kept offering to fix everything for a us at a cheaper price than FPT.  They have a much better reputation.