Airtel Xstream Fiber Experience (Direct Cities)

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MadAxe

MadAxe

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1,228
Location
New Delhi
ISP
Airtel Xstream Fiber
JioFiber
Excitel
Airtel is considered to be the best Internet Service Provider(ISP) by many in our country. It is quite popular among gamers. Also has excellent routing and good customer support.
I would really appreciate members sharing their Airtel Xstream Fiber experience by answering some questions mentioned below:

1. Which city are you from?

2. How has your experience been with Airtel Xstream Fiber?
How long have you been using it?
Are you satisfied?

3. What differences did you feel after using Airtel over your previous ISP?
Any cons of using Airtel?
What made you switch to Airtel?
If this is your first ISP, then why did you go for it?

4. Which ONT cum router has been provided to you? Any specific issues you're facing with it?

5. You can post speed tests, tracerts, pings to game servers, in game pings.

6. Also have the latency issues been solved for direct cities?
LCO cities like Patna are still having latency issues.

Note: The main purpose of this thread is helping out people take an informed decision while choosing their Internet Service Provider(ISP). The info gathered would not be used for any other purpose.
 
1) New Delhi (Dwarka to be precise)

2) Experience has been excellent
Using 100Mbps connection for past one year since fibre installation came to my location. Initial 6 months on dynamic PPPoE, later on static IP.
I am satisfied

3) The post sales service has been excellent. Had one downtime only which was also due to squirrels at my location cutting the fibre coming from DP to my house. Fibre was replaced in 4 hours time and connection was up in 6 hours post re splicing
I am not a gamer hence don't want to comment on pings etc but I have a constant VPN connection with my friend's firewall in Chicago and its uptime is close to 6 months now (as moved from dynamic to static 6 months ago)
Cons - No IPv6 yet on static connections.

Switch was made due to Fibre Installation in my area (Previous one was Nextra Broadband and was really annoying). Now 80% of the neighbourhood has Airtel, 15% ACT, remaining Jio/MTNL/Nextra

This is not my first ISP (I have ACT connection also which I am using since last 2 years and was rock solid until July last year. But it went erratic for few months post their implementation of CGNAT in Delhi. But it has been good since Jan 2021 so far. The ACT is connection is used for streaming purpose only)

4) Nokia G-140W-F, no complaints as I have been using it in bridge mode since day 1. I use Juniper SRX320 as my primary gateway which terminates both Airtel and ACT connections

5) Speedtest always give 120down / 120up. No gaming here

6) Latency to Chicago has always been under 300ms because thats what matter to me.
It is direct connection from Airtel. No LCO
 
Last edited:
MadAxe said:
1. Which city are you from?
Click to expand...

Mumbai

MadAxe said:
3. What differences did you feel after using Airtel over your previous ISP?
Any cons of using Airtel?
What made you switch to Airtel?
If this is your first ISP, then why did you go for it?
Click to expand...

Cons :

  1. Common TCP ports are blocked for incoming connections (http, https, smtp)
  2. IPV6 not rolled out yet
  3. Process of static ip + pppoe is not straight-forward

Pros:

  1. Stability (Downtime is rare, consistent speed)
  2. Professional

Previous ISP(s) : BSNL ( 1997 - 2000), Verizon (2000 - 2004), MTNL (2005 - 2008), Reliance (2009 - 2011), Airtel (2012 - current).

Airtel started with 2 mbps adsl and subsequently upgraded to 40m mbps over the years. Eventually upgraded to fiber in 2020.

MadAxe said:
4. Which ONT cum router has been provided to you? Any specific issues you're facing with it?
Click to expand...

Nokia G-2425G-A.

No issues, I use it as a wired router. All routing is handled by OpenWRT on Raspberry Pi and dedicated AP(s) for WiFi.

MadAxe said:
5. You can post speed tests, tracerts, pings to game servers, in game pings.
Click to expand...

Don't game, so not aware of gaming performance. For most "content", ping is around 5 - 20 ms (CDN for Google, FB, Twitter, Netflix , Prime are approx 20 km away.

I get ~80ms for VPN connections @ work.

Pings :

root@OpenWrt:~# ping dns.google
PING dns.google (8.8.4.4): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 8.8.4.4: seq=0 ttl=118 time=2.814 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.4.4: seq=1 ttl=118 time=2.740 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.4.4: seq=2 ttl=118 time=2.850 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.4.4: seq=3 ttl=118 time=2.725 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.4.4: seq=4 ttl=118 time=2.602 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.4.4: seq=5 ttl=118 time=3.015 ms
^C
--- dns.google ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 6 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 2.602/2.791/3.015 ms
root@OpenWrt:~# ping nytimes.com
PING nytimes.com (151.101.1.164): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 151.101.1.164: seq=0 ttl=59 time=30.516 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.1.164: seq=1 ttl=59 time=30.870 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.1.164: seq=2 ttl=59 time=30.907 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.1.164: seq=3 ttl=59 time=30.476 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.1.164: seq=4 ttl=59 time=30.865 ms
64 bytes from 151.101.1.164: seq=5 ttl=59 time=30.763 ms
^C
--- nytimes.com ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 6 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 30.476/30.732/30.907 ms
root@OpenWrt:~# ping ec2.ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com
PING ec2.ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com (52.95.35.53): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 52.95.35.53: seq=0 ttl=241 time=54.426 ms
64 bytes from 52.95.35.53: seq=1 ttl=241 time=54.552 ms
64 bytes from 52.95.35.53: seq=2 ttl=241 time=54.394 ms
64 bytes from 52.95.35.53: seq=3 ttl=241 time=54.877 ms
64 bytes from 52.95.35.53: seq=4 ttl=241 time=54.569 ms
64 bytes from 52.95.35.53: seq=5 ttl=241 time=54.480 ms
64 bytes from 52.95.35.53: seq=6 ttl=241 time=54.310 ms
^C
--- ec2.ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com ping statistics ---
7 packets transmitted, 7 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 54.310/54.515/54.877 ms
root@OpenWrt:~#
Click to expand...
 
1. I am from Munger, Bihar and I was one of the first subscriber of Airtel Fiber when it was launched in March this year.

2. The experience till date is very good and getting consistent speed all the time, downtine happened only once but was solved within 10 mins.

Cons are - not getting ipv6 till now and pings were higher here but it is now resolved in last few days and getting 6-7 ms pings.
Switched to Airtel only because my previous ISP was very costly (20 mbps @ 1298 but later price was reduced to 951, 50 mbps), other than this there was no specific reason.

3. Nokia G-2425G-A, battery drainage issue on every smartphones, so connect another router.

4. Both download and upload speeds are consistent
 
1. Mumbai
2. I have been using Airtel for 8months now. Everything has been smooth. During installation I wanted to do concealed wiring of fibre, in electrical duct, they gave me the required length of wire and came back the next day to do rest of the process. They first checked wire continuity using a red LED torch, and then completed the wiring. Later I had them enable bridge mode, add a static IP also in bridge mode. Everything was good, and I am very happy with the service provided, quality and stability of internet.

3. Constant speed, almost zero downtime (the only downtime u had was with the cyclone). Also it has more speed on offer, thanks to fibre. I had the option of taking Jio ad well, but didn't as it doesn't support bridge mode. Also Airtel has much better pings and latency in comparison to Jio.

4. Nokia G2425GA, no issues as I am not using it. I have connected it to my Firewalla Gold router in bridge mode, along with a couple of TP-Link EAP245's.

5. More than the promised 200Mbps speed, both upload and download, similar experience to international servers.

6. No latency issues.
 
1) I'm from Indore, Madhya Pradesh.

2) I've been using Airtel Fiber for almost 3 months now. The experience has been amazing- great stability, 20% faster speeds than promised. Big deal, coming from Jio which always under-delivered.

3) I used Jio Fiber 100 mbps before this, and it was good initially, but the last few months were simply terrible. My connection was performing fine according to the speedtests, but no applications were running properly- Instagram would not load so many times, 4k streaming on YT had issues plus their engineers didn't know sh*t. So, I eventually bit the bullet and switched to Airtel. I was pleasantly surprised with the experience though. Only one issue thus far, the speedtests had been very slow the past few days, but I changed the DNS server and that seems to have solved the problem.

4) Have the Dragonpath Technologies router, pretty okay-ish range. The only problem is that it is partially locked down, not as much as the Jio routers tho.

5) Speedtest on 100 mbps plan:


6) The latency seems fine, ~6ms ping every time.
 
How much time does it take for Airtel fiber plan change to get activated if I initiate via the thanks app?

I want to change my relatives 40 mbps plan to 300 for a couple of days then change it back to 40 ... Any issues?

I plan to try this over the new year weekend.
 

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