A guide to choosing your broadband service provider in India

July 4, 2008 

An article in Pune Mirror titled “Net hooks Indians like never before” claimed there were over a 28 million Internet users in India in 2008, a growth of 27 per cent over the previous year. (Pune Mirror has no version of an e-paper, hence I’ve linked to the same article in Mumbai Mirror where it appeared under a different title.)

The only thought that crossed my mind as I read this piece taking in the statistic was how were all these 28 million odd people getting connected to the Internet. As one would expect, there are no details of the study on the percentage share of  home and work users, and their mode of getting connected - through an Internet Cafe vs a dial-up/broadband connection at home. It is difficult to draw any conclusions on the broadband penetration in India currently. I found this outdated report on NASSCOM that estimated a total of 1.3 million broadband users in 2006. More recently, India Online 2007 - a  study to understand the Internet users in India across 30 cities found that 77% of home users used broadband. Now, I don’t know how many of the 28 million users are home users but 77% of home users is a significant number to choose broadband as the preferred mode.

It is disappointing that despite having a significant customer base, the key players providing  broadband services are not gearing up to the huge demand and an uninterrupted 24*7 connection with a commendable customer service remains a far dream. With the rise in spending power of urban Indians not only in major cities but in tier-2 cities as well, a huge market is lying untapped because of the inadequate penetration.

My personal experience as a broadband user has been unsatisfactory. The first time I signed up for one was in Dec 2004 with Airtel after months and months of following up when all we heard was they didn’t have a service in the area - and this was one of the upcoming locations of   about 9 Kms away from the IT corridor. After about 50 of us got together, they saw a huge oppr`1tunity and expedited the process of getting the required sanctions. Once we got the connection, I had little to complain about on the service or the speed. The experience with Airtel has been good all over India. I’ve used it in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu personally and heard good things from friends in North India. The fact that they didn’t have any presence in Pune, Maharashtra in 2005 was a huge letdown. Little has changed on that front in the past 3 years.

My next experience was with BSNL at Pune. Little said, the better. One of my frequent rants on this blog is about the disruption in Internet Connection. I am in the dark ages longer than I am connected.  I can’t find the right words to describe their customer service. For one, they don’t have a straight number (forget the much publicised 1500 - doesn’t work) that you can call at anytime of the day. Even if you do, you are almost always redirected to the local exchange who wouldn’t have a clue of what’s going on or it’s always the same thing - “server mein kuch problem hai”. Fed up of hearing the same thing, I switched over to Tata Indicom.

Tata Indicom - just one word of advice. Please don’t! It’s great so long it works. Once it doesn’t, you’ll be sent on a trip to hell.They are a disgrace to the Tata brand.

Here’s my list of the providers with their ratings:

Airtel Broadband

Availability in various parts of India (Penetration) - Moderate

Uptime and speed - Very Good

Customer Service - Very Good (no billing for the days it is down)

Proficiency of their customer service personnel in fixing problems - Good

Monthly Payment option - online available

Installation Time on signing up -  Satisfactory

Tariffs - Around Rs.799 with modem rental - unlimited download

BSNL 

Availability in various parts of India (Penetration) - Good (only advantage)

Uptime and speed  -  Good (when it works)

Customer Service - Very bad (billing irregular and billed even if it’s down the entire month)

Monthly payment option - cheque or in cash at the customer service center. This varies on the state you reside in.

Proficiency of their customer service personnel in fixing problems - Moderate

Installation Time on signing up -  Very bad. It took us two months of follow up as they didn’t have a modem.

Tariffs - Around Rs.1100 if you take the UL 900 plan with modem rental - unlimited download.

A word of advice - if you intend using it for long buy the modem instead of paying rental and then later you can sell it to BSNL itself for they are always facing a shortage of DSL modems.

Tata Indicom

Availability in various parts of India (Penetration)  - Moderate

Uptime and speed  -  Good (when it works)
Customer Service - Very bad (billed even if it’s down the entire month)

Monthly payment option - online facility available

Installation Time on signing up -  As bad as BSNL

Proficiency of their customer service personnel in fixing problems - Bad. They have no idea how to configure with a wireless router. Post paid connection are given static IPs and it was tricky to get it working. Received no help from Tata Indicom who claimed it was outside their scope.

Tariffs - Around Rs.1000 if you take the 256Kbps unlimited plan

A word of advice - if you intend using it please do not go in for the 4 month post-paid scheme where you have to pay over Rs.4000 upfront.

I’ve personally not used Sify or Hathway. What I’ve come to know is Sify’s service is not the same as it used to be.

(This is a post in progress. I’ll keep updating it as and when I have something more to add).

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Filed Under India, Infrastructure

Comments

3 Responses to “A guide to choosing your broadband service provider in India”

  1. Manish on July 4th, 2008 4:31 pm

    I used to have my broadband connection from Hathway Internet in Bangalore. I used them for 5 years and their customer service and internet availability were excellent. But then they signed up too many customers, I guess. No internet connection for many days, frequent outages etc. I switched to Airtel then and have been very happy with them. Excellent service and almost 100% uptime.

  2. Lakshmi on July 5th, 2008 1:35 am

    Manish: Thank you for sharing your experience with Hathway.

  3. Alok on July 8th, 2008 8:57 am

    Dialup BSNL - good, but slow (what did I expect?)

    DishnetDSL - good but expensive, was taken over by Tata/VSNL.

    Tata/VSNL - was good, but they goofed up on billing and kept sending me bills for a phone I never had.

    Hotwire - bad.

    Sify - bad.

    AirTel broadband - good when it works. Strange problems sometimes.

    AirTel GPRS/EDGE - surprisingly good but too expensive.

    What I would really like to see is 2Mbps, unlimited at around a thousand bucks a month.

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