Company is going under. Review on Wi5 - Wireless Broadband

I have had this Wi5 wireless internet connection for the past 8 months in Sholinganallur, OMR, Chennai. I did not subscribe to this because of the quality or the features. BSNL and Airtel simply did not have the infrastructure to provide me with a wired broadband connection in my area - just behind the TCS sholinganallur campus.

I subscribed to this with little to no expectation. I took a 3 month plan because it brought down the installation charges to around rs500. Else it was around 1500 at that time. Initially the speed was good - the tower is in the line of sight from my apartment, so it was mostly good. I has subscribed to the 1Mbps plan and I got average download speeds of 80KBps. Which is not too bad for a wireless service.

The 'wireless' part means that there will not be a wire from the tower to customer premise equipment that will be attached outside your home. From the CPE to the system it was a plain old Ethernet cable. So don't get nastily surprised. Fortunately I had a ADLS modem lying around. So I made a wifi AP out of it and now I use it wireless.

This does not mean that there are no problems. If the CPE is dislocated accidentally then the speed falls drastically. Dont fiddle with the settings in the  CPE - it is just like a ADSL modem - enter 192.168.1.254 (or whatever ip is assigned to the CPE) and you will get the CPE console. If something goes wrong here then you will need to call the Wi5 customer care. They will start by asking you to clear the cookies and cache- then the temporary files and crap like that. If you say you use linux (like I did) then they will urge you to log into windows and follow the same procedure to get connected!. If you tell that you have done a clean install of the whole windows operating system then too they will say the same sh!t.

Their connection will only work with IE and not firefox or chrome - well I have heard it all. It doesn't really matter what OS or any other software you use. You just need a browser to enter your login details so that the CPE establishes a session with the AP. This session gets frequently flushed - every one hour or so. If it does then when you load a url it will redirect to the login page again. Initially it was kind of a hassle as I leave my PC unattended for a long time to download things. Then I used 'Lastpass' plugin in firefox to auto login. I'll open a couple of tabs and let it reload automatically every 15 or so minutes. I'll open pages like google, bing ., etc there and set auto reload with lastpass enabled. After the session gets expired the reload will happen as usual and the lastpass pluggin will auto login when the login page is posted. It works fine.

Overall to sum it up he speed is good the reliability is okay - they have a 15 day offer if you recharge for 3 months. So if you do recharge like that you might get a uptime of 90 days. Service is crappy - especially phone assistance.Recommendation -well if you have any other wired connection available to you then forget this.

[UPDATE] There were many connection drops in the month of May - downtime of nearly 60% of the time. Then in the month of June the connection is now completely down. Apparently the company is going under - refer the below link and see the company's performance in the market. People in the top and middle management have already given up and dropped all pretenses. The employees have not been paid salary since March and the cost  incurred for the backbone which was leased from TATA is also not paid. Even though there is no backbone, the towers are still operational because there is no one there to switch the transmitter off!.

Game over.

Ref: https://money.rediff.com/companies/Zylog-Systems-Ltd/13190682

The parent company - Zylog Systems is under investigation by SEBI for fabricating profits that they did not actually earn and there by influencing the share price for their own benefit.

Some employees have come back to work. But the actual internet service is not at all working. People in some areas have reported that the service sometimes works (the irony of the statement about a service where the QoS and SLA are determined by uptime is really funny).

I am moving to another apartment in a couple of days, so I don't plan to be using this service there at any cost.