@Dhrubo.S I am from
AC. I got the connection activated on Jul, 14. I got the same plan 100mbps (1000GB FUP). Paid Rs. 2475/- for 3 months for which they waived off the installation charge. So far so good. They gave me the ZTE F612W
GPON. Now coming to the real downsides of Hathway. They have this irritating system of
MAC Binding with their hardware. Which means you can't attach your own
Router to do the PPPoE Authentication by setting their equipment as a Dumb Bridge. I tried calling their customer care, even though they claimed they added my own router to the MAC whitelist, it didn't work. However, there is a workaround to that. Its much easier to connect the 2nd router to the Hathway one with DHCP. And to do away with port forwarding complexities with a DOUBLE NAT setup, its best to simply set the External IP of the 2nd router in the DMZ of Hathway's Router instead of going through the pain of adding Port Forward Rules on both of them. That's it. Port Forwarding can be done from your router henceforth (+1 to my beloved ex airtel for keeping things much simple on the technical aspect).
Coming to the overhead issues of their Fibre. Yes, it did strike me that, unlike airtel or R-jio (I have seen those RJIL labelled concrete slabs in my block
😛) the Hathway wires go overhead. Even though I took the utmost care to instruct them during the wiring (going as far as chasing the linemen to the nearest post) I am indeed sceptical if they will hold up in between or from their main HUB in Sector-V. There is a cleanup work going on in Sector-V to cut off any overhead wires and force the ISPs and Cablewallahs to go underground in assistance with the local Authorities (Which I think is a good move -- to hell with visual pollution. I miss the clean Salt Lake as we grew up to). I wonder if this 'migration' would affect us in the near future. The installation engineer was clueless when I enquired about the same. Let's see how things turn out.
I am still waiting for the R-Jio Gigafiber FTTH (was never a fan of Mobile stuff as I do some heavy rsync / downloading) since 2010. After using airtel for almost 12 years, and their unmatched reliable service (even though it costs a kidney : / ) I am still a bit sceptical about Hathway. R-Jio will fill the impression created by airtel and hopefully they will have better wiring infrastructure than Hathway under the same price range.
Enough of the off-topic chit-chat and coming to my impressions of Hathway. Apart from their technical design as mentioned above the service has been good so far even though it has been 5 days ; so I can't pass a reliable comment. I am getting around 120 Mbit/s UP and 60 Mbit/s Down as per speed test and some personal observation. Although these speeds are only attainable via CAT-5E wire and
Gigabit Ethernet setup and not through WiFi (Even the 450 mbps routers are not reliable in this aspect). Till now I have not noticed any ping loss as mentioned by members previously and I hope it doesn't happen (+1 to Airtel again on this aspect). Ping times are a different matter with Hathway. Its difficult to compare it with airtel as I see. I think Hathway's upstream is VSNL/
Tata Comm and as per traceroute the internet routes through Mumbai unlike what airtel does via Chennai -> Singapore (They own a submarine cable all the way to Singtel). So ping times are noticeably better with the west (Europe / US) than with the East (Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, etc). Used to be the other way around with airtel.
I was not at all impressed by the quality of the telephonic customer care when I called them for the MAC Reset issue. It was like calling some local BSNL exchange manually
😛. I hope its not a nightmare to deal with them when there's an actual downtime.
Another issue I have seen with Hathway is that they take the Censorship bullshit thing a bit further than Airtel. Pirate-Bay is blocked as with airtel, but unlike airtel you cannot bypass the block by using https:// versions of the blocked sites (intruding in encrypted SSL requests are we?). The ISPs in India should realise they should jointly serve the interests to their paying customers instead of media barons. The international copyright laws as per the Berne Convention never dealt with 'fair and personal usage' but for unauthorised commercial usage only. But that is not the case here unfortunately.
