Hathway Cable Internet, Beware!. Review on Hathway Broadband

I have experienced their service (for four years), and have one thing to say, the people from Hathway are going to frustrate you left, right and center. They have frustrated me to such an extent that I have no choice but to look for another service.

In the beginning I was an OL24 customer, and the service was satisfactory. But from mid 2005 onwards their service started to decline. I had loads of downtime and miniscule proportion of uptime. Every month they had some problem or the other. I used to call them up every alternate day, and they had only one answer, “BACK-END problem – give us a day or two”. At last when an engineer came to my place he suggested, “go for another package, they will give you a dedicated 256 kbps connection, but you will have to purchase a modem”. I asked him repeatedly before getting the connection whether this one would be good, would I face the same problems that I am facing with OL24. He assured me that it was a good package and you wont face those problems.

He was so right…………..the problems didn’t reappear.

This time there were a whole new bunch of problems waiting for me. First of all they took more than 3 weeks to give me a new connection. I took it in my stride and hoped against all odds that this connection was going to be good. But fate had something else stored for me. The great ‘Lord Hathway’ unleashed his wrath on me from December 20th onwards.

My connection promised me of speeds upto 256kbps. I was so naïve, I had forgotten that promises were made to be broken.

256kbps, the magic number, it means I was going to get download speeds of around 32kilobytes. But from the first day on I was getting good speeds (more than 20kilobytes) day in and day out. It was satisfactory, as earlier in the OL24 connection I never got such speeds.

Come December and everything changed, the speeds started falling. I was getting between 10-15kilobytes. I called their help-line (which by the way is not toll free and they make customers hold for 15-20 minutes). They have complete fools as customer service executives; they have just a given set of solutions for any problem. For your convenience let me state them –

a)They will ask for your connection settings IP, gateway, dns, etc. then they will ask you to ping the IP and gateway (I cant understand how pinging your own IP address tells you anything about your connection status).

b)They will ask you next to check whether all the lights of your modem are blinking.

c)Then they will ask you to remove the UTP cable from the back of your cabinet and restart your machine. According to them, “we are clearing your buffer, Sir!”

d)Once the machine has restarted, plug the cable back in and check your connection.

e)If that does not help, they will ask you to ping a website. If you have already done that, they will ask you which website have you pinged, and they will ask you to ping another one (cant understand how this helps either).

f)If everything else fails, they will tell you there is no problem from our side, please check your hardware and Operating System.

g)THANK YOU FOR CALLING HATHWAY.

From December 20th onwards I called them countless times, talking to them for 30-40 minutes fruitlessly. I don’t think that they even keep logs of customer complaints; every time I called I had to explain the problem right from the scratch. My download speeds by then had dropped to 3-4 kilobytes. I had done bandwidth tests from various websites ( http://www.beelinebandwidthtest.com & https://pcpitstop.com to name a few). Imagine my frustration, I was paying 1096/- bucks for a connection of 256kbps and getting so drab speeds.

I clearly remember the last conversation that I had with the customer service executive (some guy named Sachin). I was furious that it was close to 3 weeks since I had called the first time and they had done absolutely nothing to solve my problem. When I used to call earlier, they used to tell me there was a BACK-END problem, which would be solved in a day or two (Savio you liar!). This time they argued with me for a whole 30 minutes. They asked me to access their own website ( http://www.hathway.com). As it was their own website and available only after about 4-5 hops, it was working fine. The rest of the websites that were taking 20-25 hops were not being accessed properly.

I told him listen mister, I have not taken your connection to access your website only. His reply shocked me. He said, “in that case sir I can’t help you. We don’t guarantee you the access of other websites”. That’s the point where I slammed down the receiver.

If this is the service that they provide in Mumbai, I shudder to think about other places.

Now I am still using their connection. I haven’t paid the monthly bill as of yet. I am waiting for them to cut off my connection for non-payment of bill. I think I don’t have to fulfill my part of the transaction if they don’t fulfill theirs. Anyway I am stuck with the cable modem (3000/- bucks gone down the drain). I so hope that they too incur a loss of almost the same proportion when they finally stop my connection.

So anyone out their hoping to get a connection, please remember this –

“It sure is a bed of roses in the beginning, but soon the roses wilt and its just thorns that remain”.