India Broadband Forum

Grimrocker

Hello friends, brace yourself for i gotta story to tell you. One that i experienced not too long ago and felt like sharing it with all of you. I hope you have a lotta patience to read it, cos you need it.


Lemme tell you about my experience with one of the premier ISP of our country, TATA Indicom. I have been their loyal customer ever since September 2007 and most of the time i've been using the Quick Power 180 plan. Now i dunno how many of you have heard of this plan or if its available in your city but that one's been there ever since Tata had wired broadband DSL connections. I personally believe that this is quite possibly THE BEST PLAN offered by any of the ISPs in our country. This is a time-based plan and you get 2mbps speed but you get only 180 hours of data usage per month. Doesn't sound fair now does it? But wait, if you couple it with the Night Unlimited offer for Rs. 299 per month extra you get ABSOLUTELY FREE USAGE between 9 PM - 9 AM. So that translates into free downloading of data between the above mentioned time at 2 frickin' mbps speed... which means GBs and GBs of data. I'll be honest with you guys when i say it felt like heaven in those days i.e Sept 2007-Nov 2008 and i totally loved TI for what they were offering. Oh and did i mention the price i was paying for all of this??? Exactly Rs. 1922/ ... for 3 months, which means i paid less than 650 bucks a month for all of it. And then things changed... for the worse.

Yes. Things did change for the worse in Dec 2008 when i was forced to change my broadband connection from wired to their new WiMax (totally sucks a**!!!!). I mean it's not like i never faced any kinda problems when i was using their wired connection but they were far and few in-between. The first problem i had with changing to WiMax was that they told me the plan i had been using (Quick Power 180) would not be available in WiMax and instead i had to choose between any of the unlimited plans which were quite overpriced, and still are. So i took a fight with them and lost and finally agreed to switch to WiMax. But then my wired connection was already disconnected by then and i had to stay without Internet for about 15-20 days (Oh the agony!) while i still had validity remaining. So yes, they came checked the feasibility and installed the antenna and connected my internet. That was when my problems began. And fortunately i did get back my old plan back which meant 2 mbps again in all its glory. Right after that i realized my torrent speeds had dropped ridiculously and worse, my ports weren't getting forwarded. But then the funny thing was my download speeds were good. Infact they were better than what i was getting when i was using wired connection. To make things clear for you all in wired conn. i was getting around 180kbps download speeds quite consistently while it topped out at 210kbps. But in WiMax i got 220kbps easily and sometimes even the maximum theoretical limit 256kbps (2 mbps/8) !!!! I'll post a screenshot to prove it.

Right and now we come to the worst part of it all. Ever since 2 months or so my download speeds have gradually and consistently decreased and now i'm actually getting about 20-25 kbps speeds when i'm using torrents. Sure i'll post another screenshot to prove that too. I have given numerous complaints but all i get is false promises and diminished hope. Infact till now i think i might have registered around 30 or so complaints regarding all sorts of issues from slow browsing to frequent disconnectivity. So i have given them a deadline, get my interned speeds back running again like it should on a 2 mbps connection before my validity expires next month OR i'm canceling your subscription altogether. You guys might think i'm a fool to write such a lengthy and boring experience but i'll tell you one thing, an experience like this i felt was better shared than to have lost it in time. Let this be a reminder to all TATA fanboys (i was one of 'em too) that whatever happened to me might happen to you too albeit in other ways or worse, it might've already happened. I want to know what you guys think of this, if you had the patience to stick around to read all of it that is...

P.S - I tried posting my screenshots of the pics that i had uploaded on tinypic.com but i get a message that i am not able to post URLs to other sites unless i have made 15 posts so sorry no screenshots for now. But checking this thread i will post it eventually.

krishangesh

Its unfortunate. Iam using the same TATA Indicom for the 2 years where i never faced any issue.

Pri_dm

i guess u will have to wait till you make 15 or 16 posts

Mukthar

Hi dude, its really sad, even i am using the same connection but have not faced any such problem.

Luke Skywalker

Your ISP is throttling the torrent speeds. Which torrent client you use. Use utorrent for windows platform & deluge for unix variants.

Wimax is much better than Wifi ( In fact WiMAX m is the latest approved by IEEE(which earlier approved wifi) & it is fastest technology along with LTE -A).

It will enable cheap broadband for all. Wimax can help implementing 4G ( LTE -A can also do it but it is costly).
To prevent throttling of speed by ISP enabled forced option of encryption & decryption. To use p2p sfely see my thread.http://www.indiabroadband.net/comput...tml#post198280 (Never be caught while using p2p)


PS: I'm not a fanboy of Tata Indicomm as I don't use it. Being fanboy of Starwars & Startrek is more than enough.

just4kix

If you wish to post picture before you reached 15 posts, all you have to do is change 'http' to something like 'hxxp'. Smoothvibes or I can then edit your post to make it correct (send a PM).

Grimrocker

Good for you dude. I used to feel the same way for the first 1 year of using TATA Indicom too as most of my friends who were using different ISPs almost always had problems. Anyways i do wish it goes on the same way for you

I do use utorrent for most of my downloads although i occasionally try BitComet which sometimes gives me better speeds than utorrent. And coming to my ISP throttling speeds, it could be a possibility but then in one of the forums i found a link to website that's supposed to check it and it came out saying my ISP WAS NOT throttling it. I dunno how much it's true though.

And i'm not so much into Starwars but more into Startrek.

Luke Skywalker

ISP properties varies from region to region.

Also check by downloading a small file with good seed ratio that you were not
downloading the file which have bad ratio.





PS: Who is your favorite character from Startrek?

Grimrocker

My fav would have to be Spock

- using wired connection

- using wimax

just4kix

I am not too familiar with Bit Torrent. But it appears that your port is not forwarded while using Wimax. If that is the case, then you will get low speeds.

Grimrocker

Right i know that because i am using a prepaid connection and all prepaid connections that Tata gives out come with dynamic ip. I read that in case of a postpaid connection which comes with static ip by default, all the ports are open and hence no need of port forwarding. But in this forum itself i read in a thread that even some of the people using static ip are facing the same issues so i guess it's really a dead end.

Antidote

i have taken static ip and there is no problem of port forwarding.. just call customer care and talk to the people about ports getting blocked and pester them..finally the back-end people will come or call first and then u can proove to them that their ports are blocked..
it will need considerable pestering..u can send them screenshots of ports getting blocked by utorrent port checker..

then finally ask them to try giving u static ip..
and ur problem will be solved...

Grimrocker

Well Antidote wouldn't i have to pay for the static ip though? Because i am using a prepaid connection and last time i enquired with the customer service, i was told that i would have to pay somewhere around Rs. 2000/ for getting static ip for a year. Or is it just that if i pester them enough i would be able to get it from them without paying?

Also i read in this forum that even with static ip the ports still remain blocked. Just wanted to enquire again, is it so??

Thanks for all your help man.