Airtel DTH STB is owned by the company and not the customer

[emptymt]

My Airtel HD box has been lying unused for several months since I have shifted to Hathway HD. After several pesky calls from Airtel about recharging, a fellow showed up at my door asking me to return the box if I wasn't going to use it any more.

I went back and read the terms and conditions paper and apparently Airtel has included this provision. But what I don't get is, then why does one has to pay upfront 3k to get the box home. What is that charge for? Its not a refundable deposit on the box. Airtel refuses to refund the money. They have cunningly not included any paragraph about the upfront charge and the company's obligation to the customer for that charge in their fine print.

If the box develops any fault then you are liable for it. Why is that so? It isn't your property, why should you bear the costs? Airtel should. Its their property. I had an audio niggle which would randomly crop up and Airtel wanted to charge me 750 to replace the box. Luckily Hathway HD was launched around the same time and I switched.

Had it been the case that you are buying the box for 3k and later it develops a fault, then you'd have to spend on it outside the warranty period. That would be totally acceptable because now I am spending to repair/replace my own property. Airtel wants me to spend to repair and maintain their property for them. I can't believe how blatant they are in their intentions to rip you off and yet they have amassed millions of subscribers.

TL;DR
You buy a HD box for 3k, but it really isn't yours, but if anything goes wrong with it, you pay more to replace it. And if you don't use it you return it without a refund.


Airtel wants to have their cake and eat it too. I don't know much about consumer law but this is just wrong and completely prejudiced against the consumer on the face of it. I mean they can't justify something wrong by just including it in their fine print can they?

IBF users what has happened to our old STB's when you have switched providers?

 

[mhsabir]

Airtel asked me to return and I did... I was aware of the terms, that the box is not ours as such.

 

[amit_dp]

Its not only with Airtel .. its with other too ... Reliance STB has a sticker saying that this STB will remain property of Reliance... better to sell your connection to someone when not using it.

 

[rajivkrishnan]

you cant even do that on a few connections. TS its not possible. I managed it in another way. What happened was like this: I got a standard TS box with my LCD in 2008. I had switched to TS+ SD then itself. I ended up with two new Viewing cards. The idiot took away the plain SD box and left the VC on me without it being registered. When I moved to TS+ HD, the TS+ SD box was freed up and I used it to power up a multitv connection at my parents' place by simply telling TS people that its a goddamn unused box. I had assumed the recording facility wont work. But possibly because my folks' primary connection is a TS+ HD, it seems to work flawlessly(Hunch. maybe the chap saw it as a sd pvr and put the recording facility on for me).

 

[Sushubh]

if i were in your place i had fry the device before giving it back.the funny thing is that trai made it mandatory for these companies to make their STBs inter-operable. if the devices goes bad, you pay for the repairs and replacements. if they don't company takes it back. makes a mockery of the saying that customer is the king. here customers are being treated like *******s.

 

[shr]

Well, my redundant Dish TV STB was claimed back recently and they have promised a refund of Rs 1500. Sounds cool. Waiting for the cheque fingers crossed.

 

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[amish]

I would take HDD out of my recording STB 😀

 

[rajivkrishnan]

the funny thing is that trai made it mandatory for these companies to make their STBs inter-operable.



Eh? I thought portability is a distant dream or was this some sort of guideline to lay the groundwork

 

[Sushubh]

it's definitely a guideline in place though not enforced from what i see.

 

[rajivkrishnan]

the way most of them providers are fleecing customers, i dont even see the utility of portability here. there has to be more competition for effective portability to kick in.

 

[Sushubh]

well. inter-operability would be nice for the consumer because he would be able to migrate between one provider to another without investing into a brand new stb which are already sold at a premium. though there are major complications around this concept. first... some providers launched on mpeg2 others on mpeg4. second... antenna position i believe would be different from one player to another depending upon the satellite used? of course. the operators do not want this because all of them suffer. they make most of their money from overpriced STBs. so if they do not get to sell their STBs, they do not make money.

 

[rajivkrishnan]

true we save a decent cost on the STB with portability but the bottomline is, the service we port into is no better than the one we just left. at least as of now.

 

[Sushubh]

well the same thing also applies on mobile services. but at least there is an option. service a launches a new channel that you want but your current service (b) does not have? switch to a. service c launches a new cool plan that is cheaper than the plan on your current service (b)? switch to c. and so on!

 

[amish]

Only solution to this is that DTH customer should be allowed to buy his own equipment. And it should be card based system. Standards of such system are already in place.Our government is so stupid there is no future planning. When DTH service was new, there was already talk of implementing mobile number portability.So they should have taken cue out of it and should have already made DTH portability mandatory and binding on DTH provider while DTH service was still new.But NO government would not do that. Now they simply put guidelines (and not rules) and leave loop holes.And even after all that government will claim.. hey there is no corruption!

 

[Sushubh]

well yeah. generic STBs should work. which currently they don't because every company uses their own tech for smart cards ensuring that the consumer gets stuck with a proprietary technology. as for the government... the whole concept of CAS and DTH is essentially another scam on the indian consumer. media companies probably paid bribes to the politicians to ensure that CAS and DTH are made compulsory to get around the cable guys who would allow you to run 10 TVs at your place for a fixed low monthly cost. DTH and CAS gets around this restriction ensuring that you end up paying a large amount for having multiple television sets at home. and of course, the government fooled the consumer when they claimed that CAS and DTH was being implemented to power them to pay ONLY for content that they want to pay. the idea was to lower the cable tv bill. but we are all seeing that's not happening. you could be paying as much as 600 rupees per TV depending upon your subscription plan.