Tag Archive for 'Airtel Broadband'

Airtel Fair Usage Policy :”SUCKS”!

There has been a flurry of activity in the blogosphere and a lot of people have bandied together to protest against the assinine policy of Airtel which seeks to limit our choice and control the access to Internet. Screwheads have totally lost out any imagination to spur the Internet access and in this day and age of recession, see no merit in upgrading the existing infrastructure.

Hence, they have bandied together to implement their “fair usage policy”.

Surprisingly and happily, it has found a mention in the mainstream media. Mint has taken up the cudgels on behalf of the existing customers and I truly laud their efforts.

There is no other way except to show a middle finger to the likes of Tatas (are they not always on the wrong end of the stick?), Airtel boffins (why are you screwing up a fantastic service) and Sify (the original buggers who have bastardised the broadband access in India). There are other smaller players who source their bandwidth (in effect work as re-sellers) and would be glad to limit the access accordingly.

Surprisingly, Internet and Mobile Association of India ( a bealagured body that is a rag tag association of the service providers) has spoken out against it’s members. It’s president (or whoever the self proclaimed titular head) has gone on record to say,

“If the service is provided under ‘broadband’ to the customers when they signed in, it cannot be reduced to 128 (kbps) since the government of India definition of broadband is minimum 256 (kbps). This is a violation of government policy as well as short-changing customers if they had signed in for a broadband service.”

Violation of government policy? Really? Which one dude?

For all practical purposes, I request the readers to sign up the petition to protest against the restrictive access. It can be found here.

We are already having a pathetic state of affairs. The frigging morons expect the users to broadband to check email alone. Thats the state of majority of the users.

Who has given them the right to limit our access? Beats me.

The wonders of being interconnected

Published on 16th Aug 2008 in Indian Telecom. 0 Comments Tags: Airtel, Airtel Broadband, Broadband, BSNL, India, Internet, Opera, Twitter, Web Sites.

I seem to have embraced the digital lifestyle for sure. I must confess that I am hooked on to the Web 2.0 as a social phenomenon; although I do feel hamstrung by the pathetic and high cost of access here in this country.

I have a slow (and unreliable) BSNL connection at my home and a fantastic Airtel Broadband at my work place. My daily life revolves around checking my updated RSS feeds and email including the updates on Facebook. I progress to check the new updates in the journals across the world. I get all the twitter updates on my cell, although its difficult to ensure a smooth service. I use Flickr account to update my pictures and trust Opera to keep a track of my preferences, updated bookmarks and speed dial across the platforms and geographical location. I use You Tube to stream the programmes I have favourited and watched.

I dont fancy a Blackberry as yet because I dont need an expensive option to reply to emails. So by and large, I am connected and hooked to the Internet. It hasnt taken over my life as yet but I realise that connectivity can be so important to know about what’s happening in the real world.

All this has become possible recently as part of the “broadband” revolution sweeping in. This sounds like a cliche. It really is. Much of the country is in the dark as far as basic connectivity is concerned. The “deadlines” have been revised umpteen times and no one looses sleep over the fact that in the global race, Indians are left behind only because the system cannot nurture ideas. None of the applications I mentioned are hosted in India nor designed by Indians. There are a host of me too applications chasing the fragmented pie with a “desi flavour”; it remains a disappointing experience to see that they cannot even ensure coding their web sites with existing web standards.

Societal bonds would change with the increasing thrust of Internet. As geographical boundaries melt away, we are going to see an increasing collaboration of people with common interests coming on a common platform with more profusion of ideas to collaborate towards similar goals. All in all, the existing system should facilitate this interaction. Only then, we would see the true wonders of being interconnected and interaction.

Airtel Broadband: Wow customer services

Published on 04th Aug 2008 in Indian Telecom. 3 Comments Tags: Advertisement, Airtel, Airtel Broadband, Broadband, Internet, TRAI.

Airtel Broadband offers customer servie levels unheard of in the industry. My splitter wire had gone kaput for some reason. I called up the customer care for the non functioning Internet. Within 2 hours, there was a dude at my doorstep. After fixing the fault, he gave me a receipt of the fixed fault, made me talk to a person sitting in the backend to close the complaint who cross checked with me regarding his complaints.

From close conversation, it was clear that the “engineers” are trained IT professionals. This is a drudgery job but someone has to do it. For every “colony”, there is a designated professional who handles about 10-15 complaints on an average. They offer their numbers because once you lodge in a complaint, the call gets “locked” and it is company’s hassle to resolve the issue within 4 hours. They make these claims in the advertisements and it works most of the times under ideal conditions. I was impressed with these people and their handling of the issue in a clean manner.

Airtel Broadband has a long way to go and they are selling their connections majorly on the strength of their Broadband expertise. The jury is out there and I wouldn’t be wrong in claiming that this is one of the best ISP’s in business. I have never faced a downtime; barring this issue but then this was a fault in the splitter wire worn out of use. Excellent.

Here is a message to other companies. Tone up your service levels and customer delight would follow. It only demands an attention to detail, scale up the protocols and review of the services. At end of the day, customer is the king and he deserves it so.

Airtel Broadband: Dropping too many connections nowadays

Published on 18th Apr 2008 in Airtel Broadband. 1 Comment Tags: Airtel, Airtel Broadband, Broadband.

Gautam has confirmed that his connection has similar problems. It continues to give speed boosts. But surfing is generally painful as web pages randomly stops loading or gets too slow. Makes no sense. Pings are fine.

Airtel Broadband Offensive Advertisement

Published on 24th Mar 2008 in Airtel Broadband. 3 Comments Tags: Advertisement, Advertising, Airtel, Airtel Broadband, Bharti Airtel, Broadband, Times of India.

This is just the worst form of advertising being done by Bharti Airtel. These guys need to think about the message they are conveying to the end customer.

Sam noticed the Xbox 360 videogame controller in the graphic… So perhaps the company is trying to say… Play videogames online on Airtel Broadband and you would have a life. Otherwise, you ought to be ashamed of it!

Airtel Broadband: Offering 1 Mbps unlimited

Published on 25th Feb 2008 in Indian Telecom. 4 Comments Tags: 1Mbps, Airtel, Airtel Broadband, Bandwidth rules, Broadband, MTNL, Unlimited pricing.

I got a call from an executive offering me 1 Mbps unlimited for 2222/- per month. He said that this scheme was for “select” priveleged customers and is valid for a short while. Oh gosh. 1 Mbps unlimited..!

This only confirms my suspicions. Airtel had used the 512k unlimited as a bait and wanted to “test market” the response to the “top up” offers. This, in my opinion, only serves to entince more people towards the unlimited offerings. I feel that the current price for 1 Mbps is over inflated and it should be brought down to about 1000/- price band. Trust me, the whole existing subscriber base of MTNL would want to sever off their private parts to get hooked on to something like that. As if it really makes a difference….

Airtel has the moolah and they have the network. They can easily take the initiative and soft launch it. As I had mentioned before, word of mouth publicity would do more good. They can upscale their networks in response to the demand, schedule customers (like me) who deserve more bandwidth because suddenly I have discovered that You Tube videos stream so smoothly on the new bandwidth and it has been a discovery of all sorts watching those re runs of Tom and Jerry cartoons.

If only these morons listened….they’d get a very positive feedback from this blog. I promise

Of course, the scheme gets extended to whole of the country where Airtel has it’s presence.

Airtel Broadband: Ineffective marketing?

Published on 20th Feb 2008 in Airtel Broadband, Broadband in India, General Thoughts, Indian Telecom and Mobiles. 4 Comments Tags: Airtel, Airtel Broadband, Broadband, BSNL, Mobiles, MTNL, Spectrum.

Ever since it has introduced the new 512k unlimited plans (much to my delight), I was struck by the stupidity of the dimwits that Airtel has hired. Airtel has a fantastic infrastructure because it was not weighed in by the legacy initiatives of the older sloths, MTNL and BSNL. It introduced 8 Mbps broadband speeds with download limits that anyone would piss on. It would find some eager beavers to taste the “speeds” but it remains useless to ponder on that.

I feel that the “top up” thingy should be declared illegal because you have two plans running concurrently offering the same speeds. They should migrate the existing customers to the present price plan because it makes no sense to pay higher prices for something that doesnt cost much. No one is willing to look into this because the company and the regulator seem to share the same relationship as a client and a prostitute. As long as the right money comes in, the whore mongering goes on with everyone looking at the other way. Unfortunate.

Either way, I have been arguing that the current prices donot reflect the existing price slabs across the world. Most of the major telcos in the developing world have shifted away from the 256k plans and have focussed on higher bandwidth options. Further, the prices across the spectrum are way to expensive in terms of purchasing parity; which effectively means that there is an open loot going on.

Airtel can easily slash down the prices for access; offer unlimited plans with bundling of voice calls and along with that create demand to cater to the new customers. Airtel still advertises mobiles as a lifestyle product; it should be placed as something utilatarian instead of being aspirational. Thats the whole irony of it. Dimwits have access to bucket loads of cash to burn.