Mar 27, 2014 10:41 AM
94826 Views
(Updated Apr 18, 2014 09:23 PM)
I recently dumped my 8 year old BSNL broadband connection and took a Siti Broadband connection from the local cable operator in our area. I subscribed to the 1Mbps unlimited plan. The pricing was as follows:-
Installation+ Activation= Rs 2000(non refundable)
Monthly subscription - Rs 1520
Total - Rs 3520
Coming to the pros of Siti Broadband:-
The pings are very low compared to that of BSNL. I barely get a ping of above 100 ms to any Indian servers. Most of the time it's between 40- 60 ms. This results in a seamless and smooth browsing experience.
High Speed Peering - Siti Broadband provides high speed peering through local peers in torrents. You can get speeds upto 10.6 MBps(84.8 mbps). They also have peering available for Google play store, major file sharing websites and a few YouTube channels.
Effective customer support - With my previous ISP, customer service was pretty much left to the hands of God. But with Siti, once you email or call them, they will call you back in a few hrs and try to resolve the problem, not that they are extremely knowledgeable and professional, but at least you get someone who will remotely login to your PC, clear your cache and browser history and then say "It's a LCO problem, contact them".
Now coming to the dark side of this ISP:-
Shady tariffs - With Siti Broadband and many other cable providers in India, you don't get a clear idea of how much to pay. My invoice in the siti broadband account shows a total payable monthly subscription amount of Rs 1122.46 but my cable operator charges me Rs 1500. When asked about this significant difference in pricing, he started blabbering and tried putting together excuses for this Rs 400 excess charge.
I even contacted Mr Souvick Chatterjee, VP of Siti Broadband, but got no response till date. So it is clear that there is a major tariff discrepancy with Siti Broadband and even the top management of the company don't care to get it resolved. In fact I feel that the Siti guys and hands in glove with the LCOs to charge extra money from their customers. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot, eh?
Had the tariff of Siti Broadband been controlled and transparent, I would have been a very happy customer and would have gladly recommended this service to everybody. But with this shady tariffs, I cannot recommend Siti Broadband to my friends and family. A company needs to be totally transparent about the tariff and charges to its customers, so that the customers don't feel cheated or can be taken for a ride by these local thugs(LCO).
I have already told my LCO to look into this tariff discrepancy and get back to me by the end of this billing cycle and if he still continues trying to rip me off of Rs 400, I would file a complaint with the Consumer Affairs department against Siti Broadband and my LCO.
My recommendation - Go for any other ISP that provides a transparent tariff system. With Siti, you never know how much you're being ripped off every month.
If you're a Siti Broadband customer, log on to the 24 online webpage, click on My Account > Invoice > Invoice Details and you can see the actual invoices listed there. Those invoices are address to your name and address and you can see the actual price that you should be paying to Siti. You will be surprised how much you have been paying and are still paying to your friendly LCO bhai so far.
I have attached a snapshot of the actual tariff chart that has been fixed by Siti Broadband themselves. Siti Broadband, unlike other cable broadband providers have different plans with different prices for the same bandwidth. This helps them suck more money where there is little to no competition and offers the lower priced plans to areas where there are other cable broadband players available. This is a thorough malpractice done by Siti Broadband.
Please refer to the attached chart whenever you're paying for your Siti Broadband connection. In more than 95% cases, you will see how the LCOs are blatantly ripping you off
Thank you very much for reading.
