India Broadband Forum Feed

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Kevin Pietersen has come out of one-day retirement and committed himself to all cricket for England following days of speculation over his future, reaffirming his desire to play in all international formats and dropping his demand to be allowed to spend a full season at the Indian Premier League.

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After a week in which the end of Pietersen's Test career appeared to be drawing near, due to differences with the England management and the dressing room, Pietersen has released a video retracting his previous complaints.

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Dear Airtel

After 7 years of being on your network for broadband, the time has finally come to say goodbye. When I first got my Airtel broadband connection i was bowled over by the wonderful customer service, on time installation, good service and an excellent product. Unfortunately since February of this year all of that has disappeared.

Airtel broadband service is now all about being mercenary and run on the premise of SELL SELL SELL. Ever since you introduced the 'Smart Bytes service. It has been nothing but a painful downhill ride. First you severely limited the data transfer allowed to your customers by introducing some rather absurd and restrictive FUP limits. I have used internet in 7 countries of the world and I have never seen a FUP limit of 6 or 8 GB. FUP for example in Japan is about 30 GB/Day.

After the FUP exhausts my connection is brought down to 256 kbps which is far lower than what your chief rival offers in terms of minimum speed. in fact it is half the speed of what a company whose name starts with B and ends with L gives. The effective speed that I get on my connection therefore is only about 120-140 kbps. It is a speed that is so painfully slow that even opening up websites is but nigh impossible. I have no intention ever of purchasing any Smartbytes so please do not try to even begin offering that as a solution. I believe that a minimum decent broadband speed is what you should be offering, if you dare to advertise your product as broadband. Sorry 256 kbps is not broadband in this day and age.

I tried to reason with your customer care, I wrote you emails. Contacted you over social media like Facebook and Twitter. After all of this contact, I was finally assured that my FUP will be set to 30 GB/month. My FUP limit was revised as promised, the discount was given as well. However….

As time went by your service went further downhill and then you started the new trend of interrupting web surfing with Smartbytes advertising. This is akin to annoying pop up advertising of a bygone era but of course with no opt out since the ISP (that is you people) being responsible for this sordid advertising. So desperate are you to sell these Smartbyte plans that the latest new gimmick that your company has taken to is by sending unsolicited SMS to your subscribers. My number is registered on the DND but it seems that you do not see that as a detterent.

Now things have reached to a head and I have noticed that even with a revised 30 GB FUP my internet data transfer limit runs out within 10 days. Not that you have increased my connection speed which would ordinarily explain why. I am not a heavy net user because mostly I am not a downloader, I have limited YouTube use and thats about it. Also previously with far less data transfer the FUP was lasting me far longer. This makes me suspect something is wrong with the way you are billing your customers. I talked with my friends who also have Airtel Broadband connections in Delhi, Mumbai and some others here in Chandigarh. All these friends confirm they are facing similar issues.

I have finally decided that I have had quite enough, I have decided therefore to shift my provider and to go on to some other network. I do not think that I would like to be on Airtel anymore for Broadband. You are therefore requested to terminate my connection with immediate effect. Please understand that after the receipt of this email I am not to be billed for any services and this email is to be treated as final notice for termination of connection. I have already called your customer service helpline at 121 and intimated them of my decision to disconnect. They have provided me with a complaint no. 20095010. I hope that you will appreciate that I have taken the time out to point out to you why I am dropping your company as a service provider. Let me summarise, I now feel that AIrtel has turned in to a greedy corporate leviathan which does not care for its customers or listens to what they have to say. Aggressive marketing, pushing unwanted products down our throats, being interruptive and lacking generosity are other factors. I am sorry to say but I feel fleeced.

I hope you will therefore show speed and efficiency and disconnecting my landline and broadband.

Regards

Shivdeep Singh

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