July 28, 2006
The worst ISP in India
I didn’t want to choose Tata Indicom (aka VSNL) broadband - really, I didn’t.
First on my list was BSNL; next was Airtel - from reading consumer reviews, Tata Indicom was way down on my list.
Still, BSNL doesn’t offer an unlimited data transfer package. And I couldn’t install Airtel because they apparently *need* to drive nails through your outer wall, and my landlord wasn’t cool with that. At any rate, similar catastrophes happened during my attempts to get a decent unlimited broadband connection.
Well, after a month or so, I was down to Tata Indicom on my list, and I applied; I had a connection in 5 days.
Oddly I lost signal (i.e., line signal - Tata Indicom gives you DSL) the first day. I made a call to customer care; they told me they’d resolve the problem in 24 hours, and amazingly, so they did! They sent a barely literate guy over the next morning, who told me their cable had been cut somewhere - he got me connected again in an hour. I was duly impressed by the prompt service.
To cut a long painful story short, this cycle of events started happening *EVERY SINGLE DAY*; oh wait, not every single day - sometimes, the barely literate guy doesn’t show up for a couple of days or ten. In addition, during the few hours a week that I’m actually connected, I found that transfer speeds were consistently 30% lower than advertised.
After a month of this ridiculous ’’service’’, I wanted out - I was just paying money to Tata Indicom to waste several minutes of my time every day calling customer support or talking to the barely literate technician. It’s been a month since then - I’m still trying to get them to cancel my subscription to their ’’service’’.
Meanwhile, I’ve moved on to BSNL; I prefer paying for bandwidth over paying for frustration.
Oh, and their technicians and customer service folks are terribly inept and their hilarious actions included:
1. Telling me they’re filing a complaint, but never actually doing it
2. ’’Troubleshooting’’ my lack-of-signal problems over the telephone by asking me to empty my browser cache and any number of other inane stock actions
3. Telling me my problem would be solved in 24 hours irrespective of what the problem is, whether the next two days are company holidays, and the fact that my problem never actually got resolved over the entire period of my relationship with them
My advice: don’t, for the love of god, choose Tata Indicom DSL unless they pay you at least Rs. 10,000 a month - not worth it otherwise.
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