Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Broadband Internet in India

The current state of affairs of Broadband Internet in India is as follows:

The Good

  1. Airtel Broadband (Bangalore) : The best so far (as per my experience). The uptime/performance is good, so is the customer service is good. The problems are handled very well. Incase of an outage, you get an intimation well in advance. Down side is that its not available in all areas
  2. YOU Telecom(Pune): They are not as great as Airtel but their services are decent. Problems are resolved within 24hours.One pain point is their billing system. Postpaid isn't truly postpayed and they keep nagging you to pay the bill. Another is they rate limit data downloaded via p2p networks.

The Bad
  1. BSNL (Bangalore): When it works, nothing like it. The question is how often does it work and how long does it take to get it fixed. Customer service is pathetic. They don't care about customers. You have run around to get things working.
The Ugly
  1. BSNL(Pune): People here just don't care. It took them more than 2 weeks to find out the reason why the Internet connection is not working after numerous phone calls. Not that its fixed. There is no concept of customer service! No one cares about you. Incase of a complaint you are redirected to another person and then to another. I already 5 numbers stored.
  2. Hathway(Pune): The management is bad. Its been 2 years since i have disconnected their service; i still have the rented modem and still keep getting bills. Again when it worked, it worked like a charm but unfortunately it never worked for me. The concept of customer service didn't exist.
This leaves out Satyam and Tata Indicom. I have heard/read really bad reviews for both of them. Recently Reliance entered this space. I don't have any reviews about them yet.
The state of affairs of broadband in India is really pathetic. Only few players provide good service. But again they can't provide connectivity to all parts of the city.