I was one of the early adopters of Airtel (Touchtel back then) DSL service in Bangalore. I had the connection for close to three years (till March 2006). In this period I upgraded from 256 Kbps to 512 Kbps. I am a pretty aggressive user of Internet and I use the connection also for office work. I used to use Airtel broadband daily for at least two hours. In these three years, I experienced network disruptions only thrice (on an average for about 4 hours each time). This translates to an uptime of about 99.95% as experienced by me. I also found that if Airtel promises 512Kbps, you actually get 576Kbps. Being a bandwidth fanatic, I frequently measure the speed that I get and I found that the download speed is always at least 80% of the promised throughput.
The broadband was simply fantastic. It delivered way beyond my expectations over a period of three years. But, the customer service was pathetic (for the broadband as well as for the phone). The three times that I experienced network disruptions, the calls to the customer care number were attended to by overly discourteous executives who would not even acknowledge the temporary problem with Airtel’s setup, let alone trying to help.
I then moved to another locality within Bangalore where I stayed for a year. This locality is only 7 km from the center of the city. I tried to transfer my connection there, but found that there was no connectivity in that area.
Six months back I had to shift to a new locality yet again and I tried to get an Airtel land line connection. I was told that there were no free ports. In the last six months I must have contacted Airtel 8-10 times and finally I got a call from them two days back. It took them one day to provide connectivity and to set up the DSL access. I opted for 8 Mbps and I have used the service for less than a day, but I find the signs to be really encouraging. I was able to download a 24 MB file from Microsoft site (most likely from the local Akamai cache) in almost 24 seconds. That translates to a download speed of a Mega Byte per second. This is double the maximum download speed (from the Internet) that I had experienced in the past in India and elsewhere.
In the last 5 years I have used/tried to use Internet service from five providers. What follows is a table that summarizes my experience with each of them.
1. Airtel:
Promised: 512 Kbps, 8 Mbps
Delivered: 576 Kbps, 8 Mbps
Observation: Broadband that simply works. It is like the California freeway system; thoughtfully designed with room to spare. Excellent value for money.
2. Sify:
Promised: 256 Kbps
Delivered: 240-256 Kbps
Observation: Sify delivers on the promised bandwidth, but the connection is very patchy. I used to face network disruptions almost on a daily basis, mainly due to the ineptitude of the local agent. Not cost effective at all.
3. VSNL (from Tata):
Promised: ???
Delivered: None
Observation: They collected the deposit and after countless phone calls returned the deposit after more than two months. Not a byte got transferred. The customer care is there just to stonewall your queries. I must have made at least 15 calls in these two months, but I never got past the call center. It was an experience of a life time.
4. Tat Indicom Data Card:
Promised: 230 Kbps
Delivered: 1.6 Kbps-19 Kbps (you read it right; 200 bytes/second to 2.4 kilo bytes/second)
Observation: Get this connection if you would like to find out how excruciatingly painful dialup access was in the last millennium. You pay ~800 Rs./month for a connection that would have been despised even eight years back. I have heard that data cards from Reliance and Airtel too are not that good. Avoid them if you can.
5. BSNL Broadband:
Promised: 384 Kbps - 2Mbps
Delivered: None
Observation: On occasions asked me to wait for 1-2 months for DSL after getting the land line connection (I do have a BSNL landline). I have heard that the service is good, but Airtel provides up to 4 times the speed of BSNL for almost the same fee.
