This is one of the best ever plans from Airtel. 1Mbps unlimited via WiFi. Wow. It’s a “true broadband”. I have been lucky enough to migrate to a newer plan after I got a pay revision and I have gifted myself the new speed. The biggest gain has of course been watching the amazing videos posted online. It would also speed up the torrents big time.

I am keeping my fingers crossed for proper implementation of the Broadband policy so that the distance between the haves and havenots comes down.

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 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.