I post my experience with Airtel, Maharashtra (Pune). I availed their pre-paid connection for about a year. Later, I switched to a post-paid connection on ’Idea’ network. So this review is mostly a comparison of the two network providers.

* The Airtel network is pretty good in terms of the signal strength and the overall coverage area. I’ve never had problems in most places in and around Pune. But, I never got a signal within my apartment on the first floor; which is in a fairly prime locality in Pune. Today, on the ’’Idea’’ network, I get a pretty good signal within my apartment. Of course, this could be the outcome several factors (distance to nearest cellular tower etc) and others subscribers could have experienced the contrary.

* Airtel has been advertising a lot about their congestion free network on the billboards of Pune. Well, I did not find much of a difference in the network availability of both Airtel and Idea. So, all this noise about congestion-free network is no big a deal. In this era of tough competition, no service provider can get away with a poor QoS (Quality of Service). Esp with sites like MS around :)

* The number of retail outlets which stock ’Idea’ recharge vouchers are much higer than those which stock ’Airtel’ recharge vouchers. Sometimes you have to ’hunt’ for a while to buy an ’Airtel’ recharge voucher.

* One thing I really did NOT like about Airtel, is their customer service. Ive had a very bad experience, trying to get connected to their customer service on the phone. What I really wanted was to convert my pre-paid connection to a post-paid one. Most of the times the phone at the customer service was ringing without any reply. When I did get a reply from a customer service exec, she did not help me much. After several attempts, I got pretty bugged of and decided to switch to another service provider.

Well, I got an excellent service from Idea Cellular. Their customer service guy actually dropped by my office and gave me a tempting corporate offer on post-paid connection. Airtel lost me, as a customer, merely because of their poor customer service. Bottomline, the Airtel network is decent, but far from being good.

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