May 26, 2017 02:53 PM
9249 Views
I have been having good old BSNL broadband for years and year - I have been quite happy with the service especially availability with very rare outages. In fact during the Chennai floods in 2015 and Cyclone in 2016- my BSNL phone and broadband was probably the only thing working! However BSNL had grown long-in-the tooth and the 8Mbps it had on offer did not meet my requirements as I started to require a high-speed connections having begun to work from home on a regular basis. BSNL kept advertising their FTTH Fiber and when I contacted them to switch to Fiber they said it was not technically feasible - also the high cost of Rs.500 per month rental for an ONT modem put me off.
ACT - even though I got very good reports of blazing speed and good service - I rule out due to two reasons(a) I is dependent on power at the junction box - if there is continuous power outage(common in Chennai) the battery backup fails and your internet gets disconnected.(b) You need to login with id/pwd EVERY TIME you connect to the internet- having so many devices/laptops/phones/PCs at home that was a big pain.
So when Airtel was puRobotouchshing these flyers about V-Fiber and 100 Gb download speed etc I was tempted. I called them up and Airtel responded immediately and processed my application. However when they came for installation they said that at present the speed was limited to 16 Mbps only and it would increase to 40 Mbps'shortly'. Having signed up I said what the heck and got it installed. What was attractive about the offer was(a) free VDSL modem - which costs a lot in the market and is not easily available and(b) unlimited free calls to any provider network landline/mobile 24 hours! The plan I chose was 999 @ 16 Mbps /90 Gb /month.
Couple of months down the line I got a call from them saying that now they have upgraded the lines and I would get 40 Mbps and'convinced' me to go for the Rs.1299 / 40 Mbps / 175 Gb /mon plan- which I did.
The status now: Speed - EXCELLENT - I am consistently getting download speeds of 40 Mbps and more- Amazing to see a full movie being downloaded in minutes! Upload speed is also very good at more than 8 Mbps. I have not encountered any service outage so far. Hence based on my current experience I would definitely recommend.
But as I mentioned in title - check if you are getting the maximum bandwidth(> 40 Mbps) feasible at your place. It may be that it is available a few houses down the road but not at your building. Airtel folks will say yes you will get 100 Mbps at your place but after you sign up they will say sorry- for now you will only get 8 or 16 Mpbs and it will take a few months to get higher bandwidth. Also the plans vary from time to time and city to city based on knee-jerk response to Joi! for e.g now the offer in NCR, Mumbai etc is 1000 Gb / year bonus additional free.- same offer is not available in Chennai!
so the plus points of the offer:
(1) You get blazing speeds - if your building has the feasibility
(2) Unlimited outgoing calls across India
(3) A good VDSL Wifi(Huawei) Modem for free -(note that your standard ADSL modem used for BSNL/etc will NOT work with V-Fibre)
Cons:
(1) The plans seem to be very dynamic- The later you sign up the better offer you get! All the offers seem to be applicable only to NEW customers and not existing customers.
(2) The metering(bandwidth consumption) seems very questionable. However with such a big allowance it did not affect me(as yet) but the consumption per month seems to show higher than your actual consumption.
Lets see how this goes!
