Mathew Carley

Otherwise known as “An Open Letter to Airtel”.

NOTE: In this entry, I pick on Airtel in particular. I have not had very good experience with my other providers, Idea and Vodafone India, either… if only because they could NOT tell me the appropriate settings to enter in to my phone to actually use the GPRS service. In Vodafones’ case, I went to my nearest Vodafone shop. In Ideas’ case, I happened across the settings online. In this aspect, however, Airtel actually did well. Usability of the service, which they call “Mobile Office” is not nearly so good. Either way, nothing is fabricated. Read on.

To whom it may concern,

I have been with Airtel for approximately 10 days. I use Airtel’s mobile office service exclusively for GPRS access, with a 3G-capable Nokia 6151 phone. As an aside, I have also tried putting my Airtel SIM inside my 3.5G-capable Nokia E51 with no performance difference (as Airtel still uses EDGE only). 

I am in the area of Shivaji Park (Mumbai) and have a perfect signal. Despite this, my average speeds are approximately that of a 14.4kbps modem – occasionally higher, sometimes reaching about 50-60kbps but this is often late at night or early in the morning (0000-0600). Using the same hardware, in the same area, with a different service provider, I am easily able to exceed 100kbps at any time of the day.

Because of the appalling speed I am getting with Airtel, I have lodged three cases (30208004993, 21412858700 and 0216144902) with regards to the speed of the mobile office service. In the first two cases, I have been promised a callback regarding a solution within 24 hours, the final one within 9 hours. In no instance has this happened. 

In fact, just this evening I have been trying to get ahold of a human being at Airtel for the past 30 minutes: I got one at a little after 11pm, but we were mysteriously cut-off after about 40 seconds: something that seems typical of Airtel call-center staff, as it is not the first time such a thing has taken place.  Since that call, I have attempted to reach a human at 121 over 10 times, selected the same options, and had a message say “Please SMS AIRTEL to 121. Thank you for calling, goodbye!”. This is unacceptable – I don’t know if the office is closed or if all reps are busy, but it’s not much fun not knowing why I can’t get through! 

Even during the day, when I have reached what SHOULD be the GPRS helpdesk, I never actually get the GPRS helpdesk, instead getting a rep telling me to choose options 2, 5, 9 or 2, 3, 9 – which are the exact options I am choosing. Some reps have even told me to try option 1, 2, 9 – but this idea is ludicrous, because as any Airtel customer knows, option 1 is all about billing. Still others have tried to get me to dial options that don’t exist (“We’re sorry, but this is not a valid option).

As if this is not a problem enough, when I do get someone who pretends to know what they are talking about, I have spent minutes asking them whether they actually know the difference between kbps (kilobits per second) and kBps (kilobytes per second). Fortunately for me, I do. Unfortunately for them, they think 14.4 “kbps” is normal. And it would be – if we were talking about kiloBYTES per second. Divide that by 10, and that’s the speed I’m getting. That is NOT normal.

I don’t mind losing the overhead caused by distance and technical stuff (like GSM data and so forth), but this is ridiculous. Put simply, Airtel (and any other ISP, for that matter) MUST know their metrics and allocate sufficient resources to service all customers: getting 10-20% of the advertised available speed is not acceptable – especially considering that the original speed isn’t too great to begin with. It has been, and continues to be my opinion that Airtel’s GPRS network is
overloaded. I know I am not alone in my frustrations, and I do hope that my screenshots will support my complaints.

I shall be sending this experiences to Airtel Management (NOT the complaints department – nothing will be done there), as well as the consumer affairs office and doing my best to bring the appalling levels of service to public attention. Better still, perhaps I can publicly embarrass Airtel in to providing an acceptable level of service! The state of Internet access in India is utter rubbish, and in a large, densely populated city such as Mumbai, I shouldn’t have these issues. 

As I’ve mentioned, using another Indian network allows me far greater speeds – why can’t Airtel? The minute I hear of 3G access being actually available here, I will switch to that provider so quickly, my shadow will be left standing where I once was. In fact, I am hoping that the rumours are true that we will be blessed with 3G this month – then I (and whoever else reads this) can vote with our wallets – I know I will.

Regards

Mathew Carley

 

1. While it may appear that I have a lot of things running in the background, potentially eating up bandwidth, I can assure you, this is not the case. From right to left, my systray icons are:
   1. ATI Control Panel
   2. RunDLL32 (USB drives)
   3. Antivirus
   4. Volume Control
   5. Daemon Tools
   6. LAN (Not connected)
   7. PrintScreen key disabler
   8. Windows Automatic Updates (Set to notify only: only thing needing an update is .Net 3.5 – a 250MB download!!)
   9. Pidgin
   10. Process Explorer (It’s black, so nothing even consuming CPU)
   11. MSN (Offline)
   12. Skype
   13. Java (Speed Test)
   14. RAS/DUN connection
2. No torrents, no downloads. Connection tested after 2-3 minutes of connectivity (to allow Skype etc to connect to make the test more even).
3. There are 6 tests because each access point was tested twice: airtelfun.com, airtelgprs.com and airtelmms.com. These would br set on the phone itself, then the connection restarted.