DAGUPAN CITY, Philippines - A glitch was found during the mock transmission of election results in Pangasinan on Monday.
Smartmatic-TIM was checking the connection between the municipal canvassing center to the provincial board of canvassers and the central server when the glitch occurred.
"We noticed the problem when we couldn't connect to Smartmatic's system," Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machine technician Jessie Boy Caragay told ABS-CBN News.
The test was meant to find out if Smartmatic's transmission device was capable of receiving and transmitting data on election day.
During the test in Dagupan City, the transmission device couldn't use broadband DSL or regular telephone lines.
A further check showed that this occurred because the Internet Protocol Address was still inactive
The transmission failure problem was not confined in Dagupan. It also occurred in the town Calasiao.
However, PCOS technicians here downplayed the significance of the glitch, saying they have 3 back-up transmission devices, which would tap the country's widely used cellular phone system and satellite communications.
Smartmatic earlier admitted that these devices were signal-dependent. If the back up also fails, the final resort would be to hand-deliver the election results to the Sandiganbayan.
The tests of Smartmatic-TIM's transmission system in all the towns and cities of Pangasinan are expected to be finished by Wednesday.
The Commission on Elections (Comelec) is confident Smartmatic-TIM can remove all the glitches in the transmission system before election day. -- report from Jing Vallejos, ABS-CBN Pangasinan