Spam Nation II: the wrath of Airtel
The marketing intrusiveness which Indians put up with is insane. Today, Airtel wireless started forcing me to listen to a 30-second ad before connecting my outbound calls. That’s right: the calls I’m already paying for come with mandatory ads.
This is in addition to spamming me with official Airtel telemarketing four times a week, sending me a spam SMS every day, and showing me a spam ad every single time I SMS a friend, an ad which I have to manually acknowledge before doing anything else. For this privilege I pay $50 a month (prepaid service), which by purchasing power is a lot of money in India.
Airtel’s marketing practices are loathesome. I’ve heard from wireless insiders that Airtel is a virtual operator, a marketing shell whose raison d’etre is spamming its customers. The actual heavy lifting of ops and maintenance is done by Nokia and other equipment operators which lease Airtel its equipment. Airtel exists to spam.
Sadly, it’s also the only dialup Internet connection that works. The consumer Internet situation here is so pathetic, you use that backup quite often. Reliance cellular dialup quit working, and its tech support could never figure out why.
After five months and cycling through six ISPs, I finally found an Internet connection that kind of works most of the time. I get 560 kbps actual speed for $300/month (business class), and it’s still too slow to stream video. In NYC I was getting 8 mbps for $80/month. Large companies shell out for dedicated leased lines at a minimum of $2-3K/month. I’ve heard from friends that costs are similar in Pakistan.
on Thursday, October 12th, 2006, 10:45 pm in Business, Issues, Tech › 
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>>I get 560 kbps actual speed for $300/month
Internet connection is Rs 15,000???? thats way too much…thats doesn’t sound right…doesn’t BSNL offer broadband at about Rs2000/month??
You’re talking consumer-class. For Rs. 2K/month in my neighborhood, you get DSL at 20 KB/s download which goes down for 3 months during monsoon, and no working tech support.
With my business-class connection, you get cable at 70 KB/s download, works most of the time and someone answers the phone and sends support out a day after you call.
Here’s how bad consumer Internet is in my area: I signed up with Sify two months ago. The guy showed up, took the check and– no one ever came. Black hole. Every time you call, they lie to get you off the phone and– nothing.
Back in desh, my dad has been using dialup for the last 7 years now…lots of choices (ISPs) and most of them have been very reliable. He recently switched to BSNL broadband..and he’s happy with it. They charge arnd Rs 2000 per month for a 512 Kbps line. He routinely streams stuff..and is quite happy with the service.
Looks like the situation in Bombay is really f’ed up. Its far far better in a lot of other cities in India.
I’ve never heard this spamming, ads etc by mobile providers in my home city. I usually get a prepaid card everytime I go back…and I never seem to get these spams/ads etc.
Whats up with Mumbai !
Is your dad in a tech hub like Bangalore, Hyderabad or Chennai?
Some is ’hood-specific, I hear downtown Bombay is better. My ’hood has three unique factors: hilly, Bombay monsoon and Bombay mafia which divvy up cable territory payoffs and snip cables if the operators don’t pay. The country itself doesn’t have enough cross-ocean cable from what I hear.
I can’t stream the Daily Show, the MTV Kal Penn trailer, MySpace or anything bigger than a postage stamp. But YouTube progressive download works ok.
When I was over on vacation, I used Airtel. They had no roaming, so I had to get a new phone number (SIM card) and load up money. Everytime I made a call or received one, I would get two text messages, one telling me what my balance was and another was some ad. Every single time, I wanted to do something, but luckily the thing ran out and I came back. I can understand your pain mate.
I’ve been a loyal Hutch customer ever sicne I moved back from the US, and it’s been great all over Indian including some areas that were pretty out there.
“For Rs. 2K/month in my neighborhood, you get DSL at 20 KB/s download which goes down for 3 months during monsoon, and no working tech support.” - bingo.
And you can’t do anything about it. I wish I could afford business-class. But till I can, I’m fine with the Iqara broadband I have - 20-30kbps/download, crappy, hopeless support. Heard MTNL is better but only on speed. God help you during downtime, because MTNL won’t. And here Iqara has a small edge simply because they have a support shop nearby in Hill Road (you in Bandra, right Manish?) where you can walk in and drag an engineer out to your place bypassing the whole call centre bit.
The Reliances, Airtels and Tatas will not touch residential areas with a bargepole. They advertise broadband aggressively, but not a single one of them will drop a wire to your building, leave alone your house. They’re basically focusing on ’strategic locations’ - read corporate, read newly constructed residential bldgs (of which there are so many in Bandra..and Bombay).
“I get 560 kbps actual speed for $300/month (business class), and it’s still too slow to stream video.” + “With my business-class connection, you get cable at 70 KB/s download” - isn’t that a large difference ?
“In NYC I was getting 8 mbps for $80/month. ” * drools with glazed expression finding it hard to believe that this is possible *
70 kiloBytes/second * 8 = 560 kilobits/second
I feel your pain. I have Airtel when I go back to India, and I hate it with a passion, the spam killed me. And it was impossible to charge it up in Ahmedabad, because I had gotten it in Dehradun! I think Hutch or Idea are better. I might switch. My parents have BSNL in Dehradun and its not so bad. Though my mother has to occassionally go to the BSNL office and shame them into tech support for leaving a little old white haired lady without her internet connection. Bombay sounds quite bad. Maybe you need an old lady to do battle on your behalf.
Maybe I’ll switch wireless carriers and keep Airtel around only as a dialup Internet backup. Means buying another phone but that’s better than putting up with this rank disrespect.
tsh tsh. I dont know where are you living. I have aneat 256Kbps hathway broadband in bangalore. And it works neatly. Costs
Eesh on the KB/s*8=kbps. My duh moment of the day. I’ve had Hutch for ages and haven’t faced spam on the phone (voice, data, etc). Finally - I know you’ve got business class from another ISP, but I was wondering if Airtel can’t upgrade your dial-up Internet to a DSL broadband ?
I was at an Indian Media and Entertainment conference this week. Lot of interesting stuff (explosion of channels, blah, blah)
Diving into this discussion I met a company that is claiming they will be rolling out IPTV in Bom and Delhi with 2 MPbs, using MTNL as last mile connection.
Terrible website: http://www.timebroadbandindia.com/about_us.html and I don’t know about timing and pricing
There has already been a PIL where this sort of importunating (begging?) /telemarketing has been forbidden by law. You can sue Airtel. Each time a customer care marketing asshole calls you are entitled to Rs 1000. Save your calls. The only problem is, I dont know the postal address of the marketing dept. of Airtel. If you can - anybody can - give me this information, I shall take action. Please get in touch!
I was just wondering if you’re still having problems… I’ve been there are few times and the connections were always pretty good.
I totally agree - In India customer privacy and preferences are given so little value - its very irritating trying to connect with customer support (which sucks btw) too - u ve to listen to stupid promotions before u can get some help fixing ur current problem