Orange Infocom: Review

I was looking to replace my Tikona connection that I had been using for almost a year, with exponentially increasing frustration. I looked into Airtel 4G, but it was too costly, and wireless. I looked into Reliance, and I got a Reliance 3 connection which turned out to be a steaming pile of poo.

Then I decided to not opt for wireless connections again. I contacted Reliance about their wired connectivity, after reading good reviews of their service here. Too bad(which is what I thought at that time, but now I am very grateful to Reliance for not providing their services in my area), it wasn't available in my locality. Tata, well, I couldn't get them to give me a call back even after requesting one weekly for literally 4 months. Plus last time I checked(2-3 years ago), they weren't available where I live.

Then I came across a local ISP in my city(Nagpur) which was providing fiber connectivity with good speeds, and they were available in my area.

Well, to begin with, they have hopeless customer service. They have two landline numbers for their office, one of which is engaged 24x7, and the other is engaged sometimes, and at other times, it will ring till the end with no response. Sometimes, both of these incidents happen within the course of minutes.

Then come the field agents. No such thing as courtesy in their dictionary. Their agent first promised to come to my home on Monday, 11th May, at 11:30 AM. He didn't come, and he didn't let me know he wouldn't come. I called him a dozen times throughout the course of the day, and he wouldn't pick up the phone. He finally showed up on Saturday, 16th May. 5 days late!!!

I purchased the connection on Thursday, 21st May, and he promised to have it up and running by Monday, or at most within a week. On Monday, nothing happened, but he told me that he won't be able to make it and that he'll have my connection up within the week. This happened on me calling him, so no courtesy still. He later promised to have it up and running on Thurday, 28th May, by 7PM. Well, he didn't come, and he didn't pick up any of my calls. Same story on Friday, 29th May.

He finally came on Saturday, 30th May(Today), and I've got the connection up and running for about 30 minutes now. I know this timeframe is absolutely too little to judge the connection quality, so I will update this review once I have more experience with the connection.

Their customer support reps are misinformed too. They first told me that my connection would be symmetrical, but their field agent told me that I would get at most a third of my download speed as the upload speed. Paint my angry.

I had the option of going with either fiber or copper, but since the connection is terminated within ~20 meters of my home(at the house next door), I went with copper.

They are one of the only ISPs I have tried which doesn't block anything. All websites, torrents, everything works. Tikona, Reliance(especially Reliance), BSNL, Tata, all the ISPS I have ever used block at least some websites, or utilize traffic shaping. Not Orange.

Well, without further ado, let's get to the tests.



Well, the download speeds are pretty good, but I am disappoint(ed) with the upload speeds.
I tried streaming 1080p YouTube videos, and I had absolutely no buffering visible(yet).
There are downloads running in the background, so the ping might be higher because of that(I guess, not sure about this), but here is the pingtest.



I am not very knowledgeable about traceroutes(maybe someone here can tell me if they look good), but here they are anyway. (There were downloads running in the background which weren't in my control, so I'll add more tests later)


If there are any more tests I should run, please let me know.

Here is their peering info:



I am paying 2800 INR for a 10mbit connection with 100GB FUP limit. The connection is prepaid, and there is no speed downgrade or anything. Once I've used 100GB, the connection will stop working.

They provide day-by-day usage information, like most other wired ISPs.


They also have this speed graph which doesn't seem to have populated yet:



So far, I'd say the connection seems pretty good, and the customer support seems pretty horrible. Again, this is a local ISP which provides services only in Nagpur, and I'd say a rough estimate is that they provide services in 60% of Nagpur(they are in a lot of areas other wired ISPs don't provide services in).

I'll keep updating this review as time goes on.

EDIT:

Update 1:

A bit more realistic of a speed test:



Update 2(14/06/15 - 15 days):

So far, the connection has been superb. I've faced minor hiccups a couple times, like my connection going down at 10PM in the night when there was very heavy rainfall, but the issue was fixed promptly before I was awake the next day. The place where the connection is terminated doesn't have power backup, and whenever there is a power failure(quite often these days), authentication fails for a couple minutes, which I guess means that their system might be booting up. I also faced speed issues at one point, which was accompanied by frequent disconnection, and a single phone call solved the problem within 10 minutes. Again, all of these were very minor hiccups, especially so compared to my experience with Reliance, Tikona, and BSNL. I've been able to reach 1.32MB/s download(using IDM) on the connection, which is 10.56Mb/s, about .5 Megabits more than the promised speed, and I have never seen an ISP over deliver before.

Some speedtests

(This is actually the first time I'm seeing those upload speeds)




Overall, I'm very satisfied with this ISP so far.

Update 3(21/6/15): Stay away from this ISP. Every time it rains, literally every single time, my connection goes down for hours. Its currently been down for a whole day, and their agents and their office have switched off their phones. And their phones could be on, the ring would end with no one picking up, and two minutes later, its busy. Call 30 seconds later, same, full ring, no picking up happening. They have absolutely no thing called as customer support. One single phone line which is busy more than half the time you call them. No IVR system, no nothing. At least other ISPs have 24*7 support systems, they have 9 to 5, Monday to Saturday.

Congrats on the new connection.

Looks good. Though I wonder why your trace is going to Chennai for Google.

Ping 8.8.8.8 and see what you get. Also, ping bbc.co.uk

Thanks, it seems to be performing pretty well so far.



The BBC website works just fine, but the traceroute seems to be having issues.

Apart from the occasional spike, latency looks great 😀