kaytee2009
Newbie
I've been using the 649 unlimited plan for over 4 yrs. The service seemed ok and I upgraded to 1099 Turbo 10 gb in October 2011. Then problem surfaced in the billing.I had just found out that my last bill was rs. 3332.50!!! I decided to check my billing which I never do coz I assume a big co like Airtel would not cheat on their customers. I found that to be quite wrong.It is surprising, to say the least, to find that I am charged wrongly since the beginning! I called the complaints division and told them that they are charging me Rs. 85 every month in the name of Airtel PC Secure which according to their terms is included in the VAS(Value Added Service) whichaccording to plan terms should be free. The Customer Service representative admit that, but replied, "I will deactivate the this charge from your account from now on, but for the past wrongly billed ones, I have authorisation only upto rs. 250" !! What a service!!My other complaint was the huge 3thousand plus bill I got. I decided to comb through my usage of "Speed on Demand(SOD)" which is a high speed on top of your current speed that you can opt for and charged per hour.I use it when I need to download big files in a hurry. In this particular billing period there was a single instance of the bill for Rs. 1258.33 on a single day!! The record in the bill shows that I was using it from 12 midnightfor a continuous 129174 seconds i.e. 35.88 hours!!! Now, I do not keep a record of my actual usage, which in hindsight i should have done. But how does one stay awake for more than 35 hours?? Because the SOD has to be manually renewed every hour otherwise it will be automatically deactivated?? I brought this to the representative who told me he can do nothing about it!!Then I also asked about my charge for the landline telephone that come with it. In the previous plan i.e. 649 plan, any amount till rs. 300 is free. My bill is showing this telephone bills since i upgraded. To my surprise, hetold me that the plan charges from rs. 1 - 300 and is free from 301 to 1000!! Although I am very puzzled, I could not make a fuss about this because I did not know this terms. I should have been better not to upgradeI suppose.Anyway, I told them I would like to deactivate and will be switching to another Service Provider other than Airtel and would like them to come and deactivate it. The Rep told me to just turn off the modem and it will be deactivated. For those who want to cancel their Airtel broadband connection, this seems to be the way they do things on Airtel.This is my experience of using airtel for over 4 yrs. I don't know if it happens to other Airtel users. If you decide to, it seems to me like the lower plans looks slighty better. For info: when I joined 649plan four years ago, it was in direct competition with mtnl which gives double the bandwidth i.e. 512kbps for a slightly lower bill. Because of this they used to give 512 kbps (which on normal real use comes to between 70 - 80 kbps on downloads). Currently they brought even this speed down to the original i.e. 256 kbps which gives 30-40 kbps real download speed.Kay Tee
