5. Call their hotline – As explained by the service desk, it would take a few hours before the provisioning is confirmed for my area and we would have to call the hotline if I wanted it installed as soon as possible. My friend and I spent some time walking around the mall and fiddling with a Macbook Air at an authorized reseller. We grabbed a decent meal from Wang's Dumplings at noon. My friend called the hotline 2 hours later via her cellphone and she found out if I could pay today the service can be installed the next day. Having spent a few years providing tech support for AT&T and Time Warner Cable and understanding their occasionally problematic turnaround times, I thought I was pretty lucky. Take note though that in most cases, it probably would take a week.
6. Wait in a queue - We had the option of paying some other day and delaying installation further but I wanted it done and over with so we hoofed it back to China Telecom and waited in the queue again. I was 592. The current customer was 363. Time (or the service desk) went faster this time and it took just an hour to get to the desk. I took out my UnionPay cash card, which was the the preferred mode of payment, and paid my 1-year's service. We were informed that if I came back after installation, I could apply for a free 10MB upgrade. I was, of course, wary about strings attached but I would later find out the upgrade was unnecessary.
7. On-site Installation - The China Telecom Service Crew arrived on the dot the next day. The young gentleman and an older technician started with the NID and then went about testing the wiring inside my apartment. The previous tenant had broadband so I assumed there wouldn't be any issues. The two crewmembers spent maybe 10 minutes just waiting for a steady sync light on the modem. They even called up the CO to verify the footprint. After checking the line for any signal deterioration with a hokey meter, they finally asked me to boot up my laptop. I wasn't sure if they were familiar with either openSUSE or Ubuntu so I booted up my Lenovo to Windows 7 for them. I watched the younger guy as he pulled up the default gateway address and type in the username and password. Unlike services in other countries, they didn't install any additional crapware (which TWC and AT&T can learn from).
The younger guy took the lead and spoke a bit of English. They were nice enough to point out not to bend the optical cable connected to the modem and not to use the IP telephony port at the back. They emphasized this by wagging their finger vigorously and demonstrating how cables can be folded in two. The older technician said "not wireless" pointing to the provided CPE (which was fairly obvious). The young guy wrote down his cellphone number on a piece of paper and instructed me to call him if I ever have any problems. After a long exchange of thank yous and you're welcome in Chinese, they departed. I then dashed to my Lenovo and happily set up my Linux server.
Although the China Telecom broadband crew did put in an IP address and a DNS server in the IPV4 settings, the broadband works just by plugging in any laptop to the 4-port modem as long as the service authentication is confirmed by the gateway. My openSUSE-powered EEEPC resolved the IP address and was up and running immediately, as did my Ubuntu box.
Not Bad
The experience consisted of one day's worth of waiting but again, mileage varies per location. Perhaps the installation and provisioning would have taken longer in a more populated area than Minhang. All in all, paying for one year's subscription takes away the problem of having to regularly pay bills at the convenience store. As for the 10MB upgrade, I found it unnecessary since the speed is stunted by the Great CN firewall anyway. The good news is that downloading, surfing, and watching streaming video is pretty fast if you know which sites to visit (torrent seeders aren't as accessible but they are available). On a final note, users may occasionally get the odd China Telecom-approved advertisement while browsing any site (American or otherwise). I encounter them once or twice a week. They're more of a curiosity than an annoyance and after awhile not noticeable.
After 3 months of the service with no downtime so far, I'm happy with the China Telecom broadband service in Minhang. Hopefully, it stays that way.
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