Airtel Home 128 reduced speed

[vebk]

I got a Home 128 connection in Oct '04 since they were offering free installation and registration in my colony.... the guys came and installed it fairly quickly, and the initial conection speed was great (around 300Kbps).... 😀

Well.... goods things only last so long.....

A friend of mine had warned that she had an airtel connection too, but after about a month or two of getting it, the speeds reduced dramatically.

It took them 3 months to do that in my case.... Now I am stuck at speeds around 100 Kbps..... :angry: (Weirdly enough, as someone else noticed in this forum, the upload speed often exceeds the download speed).

Well, I contacted Customer Service, and got a laconic reply aong the lines of "you got what you paid for, s*cker." Uhh.... no I f***in didn't!!

I have sent them another complaint, and am waiting for that reply.

Has anyone else experienced this problem?

For now, I am going to try and get as many friends to sign the online petition to TRAI at http://www.petitiononline.com/trai/petition.html

 

[Sushubh]

well i am new to airtel broadband. but if it happens after 2-3 months, airtel broadband people can expect online war from me.

 

[vebk]

Heh.... well I hope it doesn't happen to you!

One messed up thing was that the customer service rep answererd that I had a 128Kbps shared (???) connection.... well, I just went back to their website, and lo and behold I was correct...

http://airtel-broadband.com/faq.htm?page=12

Airtel beats its big, brown chest declaring that

"DSL is dedicated access. That means that you will get the same speed each and every time you launch your browser"

and Cable s*cks because

"Cable is a shared Network, which means that everybody in your neighborhood uses the same Bandwidth, which causes it to be real slow for you, especially during peak times"

.......... hmmm?? are they misleading customers, or are they just plain dumb? :blink:

(In the interest of being fair I will leave the option open that I am the dumb one and am missing something here)....

 

[Sushubh]

i have an airtel representative right here just now. and he said there is nothing like what you say. 😛let us hope he is right 😉

 

[hawkeye]

Originally posted by vebmetal@Jan 8 2005, 05:03 PM
Heh.... well I hope it doesn't happen to you!

One messed up thing was that the customer service rep answererd that I had a 128Kbps shared (???) connection.... well, I just went back to their website, and lo and behold I was correct...

http://airtel-broadband.com/faq.htm?page=12

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Internet Connections are ALWAYS shared. The question is where does the contention happen. If it is at the International Bandwidth level then things are fine unless your ISP is really short of BW. In other cases it could happen over the National backbone, in many cases over the Loal intra-city network backhauls and in many many cases over the last mile

In the DSL case, it is very much possible that the total bandwidth landing on the DSLAM (to which all users within an exchange are connected) is shaped. In this case, yes, you are sharing bandwidth with them and noting is @$$ured. However, if Airtel is ensuring a decent contention ratio, then in most cases you would generally get about 100 off Kbps (since PPPoATM has an approx 20 % overhead)

However, as the number of users in the exchnage grow, if they do not up their backhail BW then, performance would suffer

 

[Sushubh]

another thing. if you have a package of 128kbps and u are getting 100 kbps.... i had say its a decent deal. if they gave u around 300kbps for somedays and now you don't get it. it does not mean they are slowing down the net for you deliberately. sify on the other hand do that. once u download 75megs in a day, even 96kbps packs behave like 16kbps. that is SLOWING down.

 

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[google_singh]

On sify about a year and a half back, on my 64 kbps connection i wud easily get b/w 80 -100 kbps......now it hovers around 56 kbps.....but i cannot complain

 

[vebk]

Well no reply from Airtel so far....

Interestingly enough I am getting transmit speeds of almost 256 Kbps, but my receiving speeds hovers around 92 Kbps or so... occasionally going upto 128 Kbps or a little tiny bit more... which makes p2p not quite the great experience I was looking for.... Hell I remember downloading things at 60 KBps in the states....

It s*cks that I can't do more, coz all said and done Airtel is still the best option out there...... I just hope they realize that being the best of the worst is not a place for complacence.

On another note, I received a flyer that blazing fast sify broadband has finally come to my neighbourhood!!! yippeee!!! -_- And all they charge is like Rs. 450/- for one month unlimited!!!! Of course, they kind of forgot to mention that it's probably a 32 Kbps "Hi Speed Internet" package.... Man, I think I am going to go throw up.....

 

[vebk]

The Airtel rep replied and basically said that the connection is not shared, but it is the contention ratio that comes into play, and if I want "pure" bandwidth, I should get a connection with a 1:1 contention ratio, which of course is ridiculous since that runs into tens of thousands of rupees.....After using google and reading a little bit on contention ratios and stuff, I am still quite unclear about how (in practical terms to the user) contention ratios in DSL is any much different than sharing in Cable...... basically it seems that a certain amount of bandwidth is split between several users.... just that in DSL you have some @$$urance to the maximum number of users allowed to share this speed.Anyway, it s*cks, and I am not happy.... :angry: but at least I don't have dial-up..... B)

 

[Sushubh]

trust me if its the home package of 64kbps or 128kbps. u are supposed to get 8-16KBps. call the call center and tell them of shared speeds.even better just check out bsnl and tell the airtel guys that u are moving to bsnl broadband.