Hi Jatin,
I would suggest ACT based on my experience of 2 months so far with them. I live in Basveswarnagar BTW.
About the large number of complaints on ACT broadband:
Even i was apprehensive when i was considering applying for their connection. Just googling them turns up a long list of complaints and bad reviews.
However, i went out on a limb to try them out, since i had exhausted most of my options (crappy BSNL for 5 years and costly airtel 4G). 2 months as an ACT subscriber, I'm a happy customer. I have a 25 MBPS connection which works extremely well. Even my work
VPN works flawlessly. So far there have been 2 outages, thankfully at odd hours (2AM to 8 AM would hardly count as an outage. In fact i wouldn't even have noticed it, had it not been for an auto SMS from ACT stating this outage).
PRO:
-Very affordable high speed plans with a good amount of data allowance.
-Reliable ( only 1 outage in 2 months, that too in the wee hours of the morning)
Why then, are there so many complaints about ACT?
My analysis so far seems to suggest ACT issues were in the past and localised to specific areas. I had a chat with their salesman who explained that up until recently, ACT broadband was mistaken by local cable
TV guys to be their unauthorized cable competition, due to which the cable guys would just cut out ACT cables and repeaters running on those electric poles. This would lead to the constant unexpected outages. Apparently ACT has now ensured they have a clear understanding with cable operators of each area to ensure they don't attack ACT's equipment.
Whether we believe this sales guy's story or not, my experience with ACT over the past 2 months has been good.
About their complaint system:
Their complaint registration system is impressive. When i raised a complaint, i immediately received an auto-generated SMS about the complaint number. To be honest, this was higher than my expectations, given the reviews i had read about them.
However, the end result was less than perfect. I was able to determine the issue and fix it myself (it was with my
router). But the ACT people didn't know any of this. They took almost 8 hours to respond to my complaint. If the problem had actually been on their end, i definitely would not have liked waiting 8 hours during the day for them to come solve the problem.
Maybe this was an exceptionally busy day for their customer service Dept. But i haven't had any internet issues ever since, so this is the only sample i have to judge them.
If you want alternates, you can look into Airtel 4G wireless connection (it comes with a router).
PROS:
-High speed (4-10 MBPS)
-truly wireless: the router only needs a power cable. It has a sim inside and connects to the cell phone tower wirelessly.
CONS:
-The router costs 4k INR
-The plans are quite expensive and provide very low data. For instance, even after paying 1300 a month, i got only 12 GB a month. I was exhausting this limit in just 23-24 days in spite of cutting down my download habits and would be forced to buy their top up packs each month.
I tried getting an airtel broadband connection. However, they rejected my application twice due to 'unavailability' of ports in their boxes. I guess they're too saturated and are not interested in expanding capacity.
