The nature of online discussion forums is that mostly negative stuff gets posted, so I thought let me post about my positive experience with ACT.
I got ACT in January this year, tired of Airtel's apathy towards upgrading infrastructure for existing customers and their obsession with just getting new customers. We have been Airtel BB + Landline customers since 2004, so I was a bit hesitant to shift, but frankly ACT's plan were too enticing, and a friend in the neighbourhood had reported having a good experience with them. So we took ACT's remarkable plan (which currently is 100Mbps down AND up, with a 375GB FUP (!) @ Rs. 2999++). We have still kept Airtel as a backup as we work from home and internet breakdowns have to be avoided (the modem and router and even on our (sine wave) UPS so that WiFi doesn't go down). So let me try to put this in a nutshell:
(Needless to say, I have no personal connection with Airtel or ACT, and this is my honest and unbiased review. I have been on this forum for a long time, so hopes that says something as well).
I got ACT in January this year, tired of Airtel's apathy towards upgrading infrastructure for existing customers and their obsession with just getting new customers. We have been Airtel BB + Landline customers since 2004, so I was a bit hesitant to shift, but frankly ACT's plan were too enticing, and a friend in the neighbourhood had reported having a good experience with them. So we took ACT's remarkable plan (which currently is 100Mbps down AND up, with a 375GB FUP (!) @ Rs. 2999++). We have still kept Airtel as a backup as we work from home and internet breakdowns have to be avoided (the modem and router and even on our (sine wave) UPS so that WiFi doesn't go down). So let me try to put this in a nutshell:
- Speed: I am very happy with the speed. Going into a crazy plan like this, I was well aware that not everything is going to work @100Mbps (in this range, the bottleneck is often on the server side of whatever data you are accessing). But streamlines services like Youtube, Netflix etc. work perfectly @ 1080p without any buffering in the middle and perhaps a perfectly acceptable 3 second initial buffering for Netflix. Speedtest.net with local servers constantly give in the range of 100Mbps up and down, and tests with servers in Sweden, San Francisco etc. are also great (60 - 100Mbps range). Torrents download at an awesome 10MB/s (80Mbps) almost all the time (and it is a joy to see a 2 GB file finish downloading before you have even setup the next file to download!) After experiencing these speeds, our Airtel connection @ 8Mbps seems like a drag!
- Uptime: In these 3-4 months, ACT has only gone down twice. Once it resolved itself in a couple of hours. The other time we had to make a complaint and they fixed it within a day (apparently the fibre had somehow been cut). If Airtel has 99% uptime, I would say ACT has 95%, which is perfectly acceptable.
- Customer service: This was one area where I had apprehensions, as Airtel's customer care was fairly good, with most problems being resolved within hours. I am happy to report that ACT is up to par. Complaints can be made using their customer care line as well as their website or app, and the local technicians are also more than happy to resolve problems if you call them directly (just like Airtel - interestingly our local Airtel technician now has quit and works for ACT). The problems are resolved fairly quickly.
- FUP and usage: 375GB is massive, but now that we have 100Mbps, I have got into the habit of watching/ downloading only 720p and above, and so I may just run over this FUP one day! I have not had any issues with their calculation of the data usage, and from what I can see, uploads don't even count towards the FUP, which is amazing!
- Uploads: Another huge reason we switched to ACT was their symmetric upload speeds. Airtel gave a piddly 1Mbps upload bandwidth, while ACT gives 100Mbps. When you are backing up your photos, believe me, this makes a HUGE difference. I uploaded 100GB of photos in 4 hours or so, and the same would have taken me days on Airtel.
- Latency: I have not played any online games in the recent past, so can't report much, but from day to day experience latency does not seem to be any worse than Airtel.
(Needless to say, I have no personal connection with Airtel or ACT, and this is my honest and unbiased review. I have been on this forum for a long time, so hopes that says something as well).
