Not as bad as you may think. Review on ABC Broadband

Definately the underdog in the ISP wars, ABC Broadband seems to be the fav whipping boy for reviewers on Mouthshut.

While I do not contend the authencity of 141 reviews, I am perplexed at the variance in my experience vis-a-vis others here. I've been using ABC Broadband for the last two months and while there are many areas where the ISP can improve, it's certainly not as bad as you'd believe after reading the reviews here.

My installation was a breeze and it was one of the reasons I got ABC Broadband in the first place, every wireline provider (Airtel, Tata, BSNL) were asking me for extensive documentation and taking 3-4 days for installation while ABC Broadband was the one which responded promptly to my online request, the connection was up and running within 48 hours of my enquiry.

In addition, there is a wide gulf between the entry ticket price of ABC Broadband and other ISP's, everyone else asked me for either 1,000 Rs as installation and another 500 for registation / minimum committment for the next 3-4 months (resulting in a one time payment of around 5,000 Rs). For ABC Broadband, it cost me 1200 Rs (installation + 1st month's advance payment).

Throughout the installation, I felt that the company had a process in place for everything, I did not need to do any follow ups and the representatives were professional enough to solve my problems at one go. One of the ways you can tell whether a company is serious about customer service is checking whether they have a toll free number for handling your complaints. Any company that charges you for solving problems caused by their own product puts itself a yard back on the customer service scale.

The speeds haven't been anything to write home about till now, I am on a 649/- plan where I am supposed to get 600 kbps, in normal circumstances this would mean a download speed of around 70 kb/s in practice. However my speeds vary between 50-65 kbps. Since this is not a huge difference I haven't yet taken it up with ABC Broadband (although I feel now that I ought to do it). But I haven't faced aby horror situations like others seem to have (1 mbps connection and google's home page takes ages to open :D ).

The website is simple enough to browse and I can make online payments, check my usage history and track my trasactions with the company. I get regular reminder calls for bill payments and to check Quality of service as well.

Overall: Since ABC Broadband relies on line of sight technology, the speed issues crop up for a lot of users. However, since I do not have any such issues, I am fine with ABC Broadband. The experince of dealing with the company has been good, which is an added bonus (since I have dealt with rude staff from Airtel and Tata ISP's before).

I would recommend ABC Broadband (not to everyone, but if you are looking for an alternative/ your area is not serviced by Airtel/Tata) it's not a bad option. I recommend it since it's the underdog in the ISP wars.

For others plagued by problems in ABC Broadband, I get the frustation guys and I hope the company gets its act together for you.

Cherrios

CS