Airtel 4G speed capped to under 10 mbps again?

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vishalrao

vishalrao

The Global Village Idiot
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Pune
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Tata Play 1 gbps, Microscan 500 mbps and PDPL 300 mbps.
Wanted to see if anyone else is seeing this?

I've had the CPE wifi router device for about a year and a half and have been getting almost "full" speed of 20-30 mbps and up to 40 mbps on torrents.

But since this month (happy new year) there have been speed glitches with it dropping to 1-2 mbps but for the last few days it has been stuck at around 8-10 mbps.

I remember when Airtel started their 4G data cards in Pune 4-5 years ago it was initially full speed but they capped it to 8-10 mbps for some time. Then when I signed up for a new connection in mid 2015 I was getting close to full speeds.

I hope this is just a temporary glitch and not a downward slope in quality.
 
Probably there might be more users in your place. You could also try complaining by calling 12118.
 
Yep, checking their "open network" site, looks like there may be a new tower in my area, plus my device is showing connected to different CELL_ID so picking up another tower. 🙁

I had called their number a few days ago when I was not even getting 1-2 mbps - will call them again.
 
I couldn't agree more ! The problem has only started since Airtel 4g launched cheap plans in comparison to Jio. I have the same router as you and used to get 40-50mbps continuously for the past 9 months. The problem only started last month or two when they launched the 1495 plan or 10Gb for INR495. The download starts at 35mbps but in a minute the speeds get capped to 1.2-1.4MB/s on average to heavy downloads.
 
Yup, looks like this is Airtel's "Happy New Year" surprise offer for us 😀

Maybe they were remotely updating/rebooting the towers or something while I was facing severe speed issues.

The local server speedtest.net result shows good speed (20-35 mbps for me) but looks like international bandwidth has been capped, because fast.com results always are not more than 10 mbps, sometimes well under that, whereas earlier it would also show the full speeds.

OS updates like in Linux and simple direct single file downloads also it never goes near or above 10 mbps. Although torrents and some Youtube (4k UHD videos) luckily do get the very high speeds (around 30 mbps or so).

Not good, but not too bad either.
 
Today's update is that everything seems to be capped to under 10 mbps, they must have invested in the best speed throttling technologies out there to keep customers happy ( /s ) instead of improving things just made it worse.

I'm now just hoping beyond hope this is a temporary glitch whether due to undersea cable cut or whatever.
 

Called the CC and they now say "8 mbps" is proper 4G speed Sir you should be happy 😀 they've created a service request ticket with the networking team, let's see what they have to say.
 
We data hungry consumers are just at their mercy. They have so much stiff competition from JIO that they had to lower the data rates(10GB for 1GB price on 4g handsets for 3 months, 10GB for 495, 30GB for 1495) and eventually more traffic is coming now. I don't think they would do anything great bcuz the backend team has to maintain the QoS for which they they would cap bandwidth and release equal bandwidth to all consumers. It is only when some other competitor comes and they get lot of disconnections in lieu of better speeds from the other service provider, they would bother to think about the problem.
 
So I happened to check for updates on my Airtel 4G home wifi router CPE device and there was an update available with notes saying "for improved reliability and performance" haha.

Installed it and lo and behold the data counter feature (data usage) has been removed ! This used to be an accurate counter for how much data you have consumed and was helpful for quick access when airtel's website went down during the end of the monthly usage period.

I guess they are now preparing to skim off data from your balance bit by bit also.
 
So basically, airtel is now capping speeds instead of investing in backend infra to handle the increase in data consumption?
 
Investing in backend these days and in a country like India is a suicide. This is the only reason why FTTH hasn't been common till now. Every single day a new new policy gets framed benefiting few and penalizing others. With the ever growing competition and changing technology face, Operators are now really afraid to Invest.
 
Well it looks like they will be getting less money from me for now going forward.

I am on the Rs 2k plan (30 GB monthly data limit) and used to regularly add on smartbytes packs of 1k or 2k extra per month thanks to the high speed and doing things like watching 1080p and even 4K UHD youtube videos, but now that the speed is capped, I've stopped doing that.

This month I don't feel the need to topup extra data, so Airtel are losing that extra Rs 1k-2k "ARPU" kind thing, at least from me. I hope they realise a drop in revenue and figure out they need to restore the full speeds and not artificially limit stuff, for their own good.

I dunno what brilliant people are there making such decisions, they should be bitchslapped for being consumer-unfriendly.
 
One possibility I just thought of is that Airtel must have started other LTE bands in Pune (Maharashtra) like 1800mhz and the CPE device which supports other bands might be locking on to the slow 1800 mhz one due to better signal strength.

I did notice the "SINR" (signal to noise ratio) number go up from 10-12 dB to 18-19 dB since the speed drop around Jan 8th also when there were issues latching on to the usual tower CELL ID.

Sadly, there isn't an option on the device settings to force it to connect to the fast 2300 mhz band (and it doesn't show this info anywhere) so if this is what's happening then we're out of luck.

Hopefully they launch CA (carrier aggregation) and new CPE devices which support CA for higher speeds soon enough.

Where I stay there doesn't seem to be any hope even in the future for fast wired broadband options, so it will have to either be Airtel's or JIO's 4G.
 
Not a possibility but a truth. I was also trying to do some tests with the CPE Sim yesterday evening and to my surprise most of the time (90%) the device (phone) was latching to Band 3 (1800mhz) and not Band 40. Even at the location where the router is always kept, it latched to Band3. Only for few split seconds while i was roaming on the terrace from corner to corner to see check better signal strength, it did latch to band 40 but that was just for less than a min. If my observation is correct, they have configured the band40 on basis of distance. It does connect to Band40 as a priority over Band 3 but you need to about 200-250m circle radius range from the tower which makes sense as band40 signal degrades pretty fast over distance. Really wish that some real bad ass techie at the backend implements something for the CPE devices maybe a software upgrade where some bands can be disabled.
 
Yup, hoping for a firmware upgrade for the CPE device which will allow choosing the band, but they apparently only recently sent out a new firmware update, so not sure if/when another one will get released.

Or better yet, in my own opinion, launch CA with new CA-enabled CPE devices, I wouldn't mind buying that.
 

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