India Broadband Forum

India Broadband

Having had bad experience with ’’Hathway’’ b r o o o a a d band connection, I was about to switch to Saify. Mouthshut and it’s members have saved me the trouble. Of course I could not have done it anyway since Hathway is the only service provider in my area

. Initially ’’Hathway’’ was pretty good. Of late they have gone the Hath Way! Like all other high tech services, their marketing brains have introduced more schemes - yes SCHEMES - to confuse the users. One of the brilliant ideas they have come up is to reduce the help lines from 10 to just 1. This is to give you a sense of achievement when you are able to get them on line and forget all the problems you wanted to bombard them with. Seriously, I think the problem is the monopoly they enjoy over a given locality.

Competition among privatized services leading to consumer benefit exists just in our imagination. I feel that consumers have better redress mechanism available to them when dealing with monopoly services provided by the government agencies. Cable TV is just another example in this regard.

The providers of these services have a way of growing into a big size on consumer trust, gobble up smaller competitors, form a cartel, monopolize and then exploit the same consumers who made them the giants. The consumer forums, if any, are very meek and cumbersome to approach by an individual.

It is a sad state of affairs that an internationally free medium like Internet is suffering at the hands of few unscrupulous operators in India.