Reliable connection, occasional bad service. Review on Airtel Broadband

Apr 2017

The matter mentioned below under Mar 2017 was amicably resolved, by reverting the charges at nodal officer's level. With follow with nodal officer the connection speed was also restored. Nodal officer also took cognizance of the complaint about rude behavior of the customer support - at least they told me so.

I would treat this phase as a one off bad experience in otherwise good experience for several years and revise the rating upward again.

Mar 2017

Had never imagined I'll have to write above subject for them after enjoying a good reliable connection and customer service for several years.

I am constrained to change my opinion about them after recent incidences.

I recently upgraded the broadband plan which includes free and local STD calls. The speed was supposed to be revised from 8mbps to 16mbps

Firstly, very rarely I get a speed of 16mbps. Often it is just about 1 to 2 mbps. Several complaints have been filed till now and each time only temporarily speed goes up and falls back to slow speed after some time. I think they are not fixing the problem of bandwidth. They are merely trying to pacify a complaining customer.

Secondly, the local and STD are not really free. There is something called "premium numbers". And you have no way of knowing them. You get to know only when you get a bill shock.

Firstly airtel never told me anything about such numbers being charged. Their advertisement, entire procedure of changing the plan, nowhere even once they mentioned this.

Now on complaining the customer service lady showed poorest level of professionalism in dealing with this:

This is roughly the transcript:

me: You have charged me for calls

cs: No you have not been charged at all.

me: Cite exact figures

cs: That is for "premium numbers".

me: But you never told me anything like that.

cs: We are "educating" our customer on this.

me: But you can't first charge me and then "educate"

cs: Look I was not the one who changed your plan

(Now this is most immature for a customer service rep to say)

me: Look, I am not talking to any person. I am talking to airtel. Airtel didn't tell me anything about charged calls.

cs: No no, as per the procedure these calls are charged.

me: Want to talk to a senior official.

cs: No senior officials are available.

me: Look, that's not acceptable. I will take this up with TRAI.

cs: But it's a small amount sir.

me: Doesn't matter whether amount is small or not

cs: Hangs up in a rude way.

Now I am going to take this up with TRAI.

I feel cheated and am reducing the rating.

Jul 2016

I zeroed down to airtel wired broadband as my ISP after trying out various wired and wireless options. Tata Indicom in particular was most pathetic of the journey, most unreliable in terms of uptime and virtually no customer service. But will talk

about it in some other review.

With aritel broadband I get promised speeds as per my plan regularly.

The uptime is very good. Hardly 2/3 times in last 2 years there was an outage and that was resolved on war footing.

Biggest plus with airtel broadband is the customer service. When I once called to complain about a rare outage, they readily had information about issue in that area and ETA to correct it.

Customer service over email is also very responsive.

One odd time I had to deal with some technical issue and unlike any other provider, I was given access to a technical person from the back end without much fuss. This is nearly impossible with any other provider I worked with.

There are no negatives that I noticed till now.