India Broadband Forum

India Broadband

Title should portray what I mean, let me explain friends. It’s a golden day in my life. Because I am connected to the internet today and websites are opening on top of that!! OOPS!! I do not know if my InterNUT will be working till I post this review. That is sify.

Hey guys, do you know what is being abbrevated to SIFY?

Slow Internet For You - SIFY.

Let me just list out the problems.
-------------------------------------------

1. The very first beginning, new user creation page was so stupid. The way they do validation is miserable. Because that page said, I MUST fill up my office phone?s extension number, which MUST be at least 6 digits. I really doubt if there is an office in India, which has a 6 digit extension number. I filled up six zeros and registration was successful. Who is fool here? Are those web designers fools? Or am I fool? Or are we both fools? I don?t know.

2. There are lots of IP conflicts.

3. These people have introduced a broadband client for login and logout. It is the most pathetic piece of win32 application I ever know. I have to make a bulleted list of the troubles this special dialer can cause.

a) The first time you install the dialer, it asks you to uninstall your antivirus since it will install some new antivirus. Who are they to decide what antivirus should I use? Is there some contract between McAfee and sify?

b) If the user is not experienced or proficient with computers, he might click continue and my friends pc was jack hammered because this idiotic dialer installed that new antivirus along with existing one (existing one was Norton antivirus 2005 which is already a huge load on the processor). Since the machine was running windows xp, somehow it came to a stable state after 14 minutes. I killed ALL antivirus processes and uninstalled both the antivirus, and reinstalled Norton.

c) Guess what? Now when we installed the dialer again, it tried to install that same antivirus in the same manner. I had to kill that process. When we called up sify help, that person said very leisurely that we must have called sify before installing that dialer, and they will disable antivirus installation from their side. Now my question is, WHY THE HELL WONT YOU LET ME DO THAT? Why should I call you unnecessarily for a silly matter? Believe me folks; there is no option but to call them if you don’t want that antivirus.

d) Now the dialer is installed. When you start it, it is irresponsive most of the times. You have to kill the process hitting windows magic key combo (CTRL+DEL+ALT) and restart it.

e) If it responds, it MAY connect to the internet.

f) It has a trouble shoot button, which causes most of the troubles. You click that and your machine will freeze! (It?s so cool that your machine freezes!)

Let?s come back to general problems
----------------------------------------------

If you write them an email (customercare@sify.com) you will get a reply stating sify is great, it is iso 9001 standardised, it has phone help, online chat help, and all such things. After that email, they will reply promptly asking about your problem and all, but they wont take any action.

I got quite a lot of friends because of sify. Unbelievable? Shocking? Confused? But true. It is because I keep calling sify call center every now and then. So all those people are my friends now. (I made a few girl friends too. LOL)

Sify says mine is a shared connection and so I won?t get much speed. I know this fact; I am a computer professional too. But when we click to know about our account, a screen shows up saying 32+ but I barely get 32 kbps surf speed. I have screenshots of tests which I made with bandwidth meter. When I asked sify customer care, they said they won?t believe it if I did not give any proof. So I mailed again with those screenshots as attachments. But no reply from the other side.

I have a suggestion for sify. Fast-food culture is coming up in India, especially in Mumbai and Delhi. So if sify plans to change its business, they can take up fast-food sector and shine there!! We may see the following items to hit the market with great broadband speed.

1. Sify BroadBun Burger
2. NutCracked Salmon Sandwich (formerly known as netcracker internet)
3. Sify Softy vanilla
4. Sify Cheese bites.... and much more to come. Mmmm.... yummy.. I can?t wait!!

Finally friend, are you planning to take a sify connection?