A few months ago, we suddenly realized that our telephone wiring had gone kaput. This is the wiring that was put in during construction and was already cemented into the walls.
I don’t know what caused the problem – it could be bad wiring practices, water damage, insects could be eating the wiring, who knows. Some of the wiring was run above the ceiling, and was hard to get through.
Whenever we have PLDT technicians at home troubleshooting DSL connection problems, they always tell us that something is wrong with our telephone’s wiring because they could hear a soft howling noise (umuugong) in the background of our dial tone. But the DSL / internet was working, and we didn’t know how to fix the wiring, so we left it at that. As long as the DSL was working, that particular problem was kicked down the road.
HOW TO FIX A PHONE WIRING PROBLEM BY REWIRING
Well, a few months ago, our telephone line had truly gone problematic. We called PLDT and a technician came over. Rewiring the whole house the “internal” way just wasn’t an option because we didn’t have time to have people crack open our walls and ceiling to get to the original wiring and fix it. Besides, it’s bound to be an expensive and dusty job.
We asked the PLDT technician for options and he said they could rewire the house. That didn’t even occur to me! I thought we had to pull out and fix the old wiring. We hired him to rewire the house on his day off. They were just going to do an “external” type of wiring, meaning they were just going to put in new wiring for our phones and DSL without having to crack open walls. This is going to bypass the old wiring. The technician is going to run a new wire from the PLDT box outside to our house.
The price depends on your negotiation, but for our house, we agreed on P2,500 for the job, and all the materials to be used are already included in the P2,500 price. Yes, all the wires and boxes were provided by the technician. That’s one less problem for me since I don’t need to worry about buying any supplies.
The technician came with a companion, so there were two of them working on the job. The job only took about 2 hours. If you have a small house and fewer extension lines, it would definitely be faster. There was very little mess, and thank goodness we didn’t have to tear out concrete from the walls! They did their best to hide the wiring, please excuse the dirty walls…
It’s not going to win any pretty house awards, but it works: our phone line is working great with no interference, our internet is faster. Also, should there be any wiring problem in the future, it will be easier to fix since the wires are visible and easily accessible. I figure if it really starts to bother me aesthetically, I can always paint the wires the same color as the walls or use wire ducts to make it look less ugly. But that’s a project for the future.
Our technician was very nice and did a good and thorough job on the wiring. One advantage of hiring the PLDT technician was that he knows all the PLDT voodoo and he was able to fully test the wiring to make sure it was compatible and working with PLDT’s technical er… stuff (too technical for me, basta, it works!).
I am not going to give out the technician’s name in case this sort of practice is frowned upon by his bosses, I don’t know. But we’re still a satisfied PLDT customer with better phone service, so that’s a win for PLDT, right? ;P
My suggestion is for you to make nice with the PLDT technician assigned to your area if you need this kind of service. 🙂
