Well, I can finally fall asleep, (in bed) while browsing the net on my PSP over wireless. Thats right ADSL has finally come home. I was waiting for it to come to our neighborhood for the past two years or so. For those can recall would know that I had to go through several painful temporary solutions with nothing much to settle on. At last now, I can finally disconnect that CDMA piece of crap!
Getting the ADSL connection wasn't painless either. Since it was my dad who owned the phone line, I had to get him to sign the forms and even submit a photo copy of his ID since he couldn't be there in person.
The real problem was that I only got to know about it, only after trying to handover the filled form. So I had to make two trips over two days just for them to accept the application. But that wasn't the end of it.
I initially handed over the form to the WTC Teleshop, and waited for about a week before calling to check on progress. Thats when I realized what seemed to have been a lost application in transit - from WTC to the Kotte exchange.
I wasn't in the mood for a miracle, so instead decided to fill in another form and to take my dad along to the Kotte exchange, this time around. We hit another snag when they said that according to their computer system, we hadn't paid the last phone bill, despite my dad remembering it was paid a little over 3 weeks earlier. It turns out that when you pay bills through the bank it can take some time. Since the system didn't allow our application to be entered with an outstanding balance, and since we hadn't brought our receipt, we decided to repay the last bill with the understanding it will be adjusted in the next bill. Fortunately they did let me add the ADSL connection fees on credit to the next bill as opposed to paying it then and there.
If all this wasn't enough, I later came to learn that our home address was somewhat outdated on the SLT database. Basically we used to use a different house number (Don't ask me why) to the one we use now. This resulted in another request to fax a letter signed by my dad explaining it.
But finally when all of that was sorted out, I did get the connection in just two days. So if I hadn't gone to the WTC teleshop and instead gone direct to the Kotte exchange and didn't have the address issue - so in an ideal world, I would have got it in just two days, which in itself is pretty amazing (considering what they tell you its gonna be). I am yet to officially be notified of my connection though.
For anyone is wondering about ADSL, head on over to http://www.slt.lk/data/forhome/106adsl_areas.asp and wonder no more.