Smart Bro’s Marketing Strategy
8 Oct, 2007 7:02 AM
Tech Tips 
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This is how Smart Bro, Smart Communication’s wireless broadband company, treats their customer after the one-year lock-in period.
For one year, you may not pay two to three months of subscription. But after the lock-in period, you will be immediately disconnected one month after the failure to pay the bill and you are required to pay the bill in advance.
This exactly what happened to us last Tuesday. I was doing an FTP and since the files are 25MB in size, I fall asleep while doing it. I didn’t realize that by midnight, there was no longer Internet service. All I saw on the screen was this:
I though that there was a new policy in Smart to login first with your username and password before browsing. I verified the next day with my neighbor that he hasn’t paid the bill yet because of some issues.
First, he did not pay the August bill because the bill always reflects an additional P 999. He said that he is still waiting for the September bill to know where this amount is for. And second, the bill for September has not arrived yet since it will be delivered after about two weeks after the billing period.
After much debating with the agent, we were compelled to pay the advance payment and September bill which has not arrived yet.
Well, I guess we just have to live with it. As long as we pay, we are connected.
JD said
am November 5 2007 @ 7:05 am
ive been a victim also with this! Smart sucks!!! i was forced to pay also a full 6mnths and a legel payment of 1800….damn Smart… now im paying 1500 every 2mnths. thats my strategy right now.. if not because for their signal stability id better transfer, but since im a level 3 tech at earthlink and we are masters of dsl connection its better to resort to this wireless so as not to have regular disconnections, unlike the modem type of connections where in you suffer from modem issues and unstable 2way traffic.. its not like that we can call tech support and assist us w/ the issues.
Joseph said
am November 5 2007 @ 9:20 am
Would there really be a need to call Smart’s tech support if you could troubleshoot it on your own? He he. Baka mas may alam ka pa sa support nila. Or perhaps they are just using a decision tree for QA purposes.