Jul 27, 2012 12:08 PM
2199 Views
It is strange, but even I am left with a bad taste in mouth with Airtel broadband, I have to give them full stars in all the categories mentioned. For the problem doesn't lie in there. Their speed of connection never drops from what they have promised. Different matter the FUP makes it unusable. The connection reliability is amazing. I had it for over 5 years and it dropped like 5 times.
Service and support are the USP's of airtel. I usually rang them late in the night when I found out a trouble, mostly due to my irking router. They were available next morning. Never charged me for what essentially was my problem. All the features kept me going for a good 5 years as their customer. And satisfied too. Till I found others.
The problem with Airtel is they are overpriced. By a huge margin. Since I was old customer, I used to get 100 gb per month of usage. I rarely crossed 30 gbs but sometimes I did. To imagine to be stuck at 256 kbps was obnoxious. If they need to implement FUP, it has to be not on the monthly basis but on the yearly basis. Rarely one does need to download. And it is fair usage. Severely restricting download and upload and calling it unlimited under fair usage is against genuine user interests and usability. They provided some x number of calls free from landline to local numbers. Although free they always charged it. When told about it,
Although their support staff were great, they did intermittently have problems of wrong billing of usage. I had my bandwidth cut down a few instances, wrongly of course, of usage crossing 100gb inside 24 hours, When told it was impossible, it didn't help. They restored it later but only after few number of calls. Undue harassment there.
Then it was their calls. How can you keep calling a customer 5 years old to deposit monthly bill just because he is a few days late? And that an unreasonable amount of 75 is being levied anyway, then I would rather wait for next month and pay it at once. They had no respect for my privacy. Kept calling them while I was in meeting, in office, at odd hours! That when they never had a problem with receiving money all these years! I couldn't believe their insanity. Finally, this was the real reason I moved out.
When I did, it was another shock. When told about I want to disconnect the connection, I received at least 25 calls from different operators unnecessarily advising me to hold on. Might be their tactic to keep the customer feel privileged but it had the opposite impact on me. I was being disturbed without reason. And they had nothing to offer me. They conveniently ate away my deposits. I didn't had time to follow them up. But it did left me with a nasty feeling in mouth. One of the reasons, I outright rejected Airtel when upgrading from hathway to d2h. I wonder why they enter into these cheap theatrics. At the end, in spite of doing spectacular job all these years( at a very high premium), they let all the goodwill go away.
I am now a very happy customer of Act tv broadband. After initial pangs for around 45 days with frequent disruptions, I am now getting around 10 mbps upload, 10 mbps download, 50 gb fup which is just right for my usage. All this for 30% lesser price.
Broadband mostly is maintenance free service. And they have traffic management people on the back-end doing all the checking. So they are able to fix problems even before you notice. This gives Airtel a lesser advantage for it's usp - Service. Sorry Airtel- you lost a genuine customer without reason. And I am going to stay away from you. Far away.
