India Broadband

India Broadband

Broad band connection means a world to those who are interested in hassle-free browsing on the net with good speed. Speed is the essence of all broadband connections and reliability too. Now Tata Indicom broadband a.k.a. VSNL is downright sick. I got the connection last year at my home so that I could do some solid browsing after I reach home from office. Prior to this I was using a dial up connection. I went for a 512 kbps speed package and I must say for the last one year it’s been one hell of a pain. I stay in Delhi’s Vasant Kunj area which in a way is an upmarket area of sorts. I was shocked to realise that the wire that they pulled into my house did not come from a junction box outside my house but from a tree top!! Can you believe that??? Yes, Tata’s wires are spread over tree tops and building tops unlike the wires of Airtel which are distributed through underground conduits. So why did I go for the Tata connection? well I thought maybe Ratan Tata had something to do with this so I believed his set up. Immediately after getting the connection, the service did not work for almost for a month. I hung around patiently with the service providers because they promised that there had been a major problem in my locality. After that one month, the service was up and as my record shows, seven out of ten tries I made connecting through Tata, I failed. I may have made a zillion phone calls to the customer care, (remember, each phone call made is extra cost to me!) talked to hundreds of executives (Sanjay, Shilu, Anita, Tarun, Ajay....the list is endless), been promised a hundred times that the service would improve....but I do not see any improvement in the near future at least. Bills come promptly on time, sometimes they even give a few discounts for non-functioning of service, payments are made in time...but the huge fault line divides Tatas and me!!
To add insult to injury, Tatas also give me an option. ’’Why don’t you use our dial up connection please for the time being??’’....No, that does not come free....they charge me for that. Plus the extra for the use of my phone line....
And then here comes the worst surprise....512 kbps speed is not really 512...it’s 256 kbps...I just checked it out through a couple of internet sites....Tata has no answer for that......maybe Ratan Tata is too busy making the Rs 1 lakh car!!