What a service should not be... Review on Hathway Broadband

I thought I will update my earlier comments so that other readers can benefit from my experience.

Problems I found with Hathway:

1. Connection related(speed):  Hathway does not offer any objective method to verify the speed.  So, they promise something and we get something else.  I used https://tcpiq.com to measure Hathway's performance; it was ALWAYS less than 100 kbps instead of the promised 512 kbps.

For comparison, the Dataone from BSNL has been consistently(tw months) showing speeds in excess of 350 kbps(for a 256 kbps to 2 Mbps connection).  That too for just Rs.250 per month.

1. Customer service;  The phones are answered quickly, but thse executives have no idea of what the operations team is doing.  There is also a disconnect between this call center and the billing department.  So, no request gets processed easily.

This is in contrast to what happens at Airtel or BSNL.

1. Billing:  I took a prepaid connection, yet they keep sending me some bill every month - despite disconnecting the service.  No one knows what it is - that is, when I managed to get through to the billing department.

2. Disconnection process:  It is two months and they have not taken their modem back nor returned my Rs.1000 deposit.  I do not think they will ever return the deposit.  The same happened to another friend at Cambridge Layout(I still have his modem with me).

Conclusion:  Avoid this provider at all costs.  Not only the inter access bad, their service is more like "kirana" shop and definitely not that of a corporate.

Airtel and BSNL are better; BSNL is cheaper and offers higher speed, so if it is available, go for it.

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I opted for a Hathway internet connection because they promised 512 kbps on downlink.  However, the speed never went beyond 90 kbps.  In one month, I would have called them some 20 times to ask them to find the problem.  Nothing ever happened.

Then, I asked them to close the account, take the modem and refund the security deposit.  I have been trying to get them to respond for over a month now.  They simply do not respond; they just say " we will get in touch with you" and nothing happens.

They have a separate contact number for billing department; one of the numbers does not exist and the other no one ever answers.

So, not only they charged me for providing a lousy 90 kbps connection, they are now sitting on my security deposit(which I believe they would never return).

While I cannot generalize Hathway's performance and service, they appear to be a pretty bad ISP to sign up with.  Even BSNL is far better.