airtel Xstream fiber users in Odisha

[Satya97]

Another reason for poor expansion is BMC ,they are cutting down overhead wires at prominent places as part of keeping the streets clean and forcing local ISPs to use OFC circuit they have installed around the city ,but problem is it doesn't cover till the last mile ,only to certain points ,so local ISPs doesn't want to pay / buy capacity from BMC for OFC and again pay TPCODL / install poles, over head cables for last mile connectivity.

Moreover ,many local ISPs have restricted the Tier-I ISPs from expanding as they have major political influence. But now ,they(Tier-1) are expanding slowly with proper permission and authority.

Airtel have covered most the apartment where their are more than 100 Flats and it close to the main roads. That was the reply i got from their local guy and appellate authority few months back. Expanding to individual homes/houses will definitely take time they said.

They have Ads/posters like these in Chandrasekharpur area, where they have started giving connection to individual homes.

 

[Halter]

Any updates on their expansion to other towns? Can mailing the appellate authority help at all ( like I get hold of many people and tell them to send these mails to Airtel )

 

[Xposed]

From which town are you?

 

[Halter]

Dhenkanal @Xposed. We have Jio fiber here since a year now and a couple of other Local providers like Alliance, Railwire. BSNL Fiber is here too. There were rumors about Airtel. I contacted their local guy he kept saying "It will be here in 6months" I asked him this question every 6 months his replies continue with the same fashion it's an endless cycle -_-. I want Airtel because hopefully they will be able to provide same uptime as Jio and I can buy STATIC IP from them

 

[Halter]

Got the connection from Airtel today. Ping is similar to Jio fiber's except I'm having better speeds and Loaded latency has come down quite a bit after switching from Jio. I can ping my Public IP as well. So far there have been no latency or packet loss issues. I tried to Port forward but it's not working for some reason. They provided me the router from ZTE i.e F670LV9.0 I tried doing DMZ and Port Forwarding turning off firewalls but still no luck. I'm not sure if it's the issue with router or Airtel is blocking me. I called Customer Care to raise a request for Static IP but they're telling me that my connection is prepaid and not postpaid so they can't provide me a Static IP. I then queried if I can switch to Postpaid connection to which their reply was your Area is currently only issuing prepaid connections so seems like there's nothing I can do atm. If anyone here is using Airtel and is from Odisha let me know what to do lol.

 

[Xposed]

Whole odisha is under LCO model no static ip and speeds avobe 300mbps

 

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[Halter]

@Xposed man that's really sad well at least the loaded latency has come down and overall latency is a bit better during my CSGO games in comparison to Jio fiber. Guess there is not much hope left regarding getting a static IP working with this ( was wondering if I reach out to them with mails regarding Static IP for CCTV and stuff )

 

[Xposed]

Loaded latency on jio fiber can be fixed by a simple reboot, Airtel is no better in odisha considering the situation in odisha

 

[Halter]

I got a Static IP from Airtel now and I live in a town so for you city folks you should be able to get one for yourself. I've been using Airtel for the past 10 months I guess. The pings have been really good to Europe, Singapore, Indian servers. Also getting 1 gig speeds for free and their service has been really nice here. The Entire time I think the connection only went down 1 or 2 times and funnily enough I've CCTV footage of monkeys coming and dangling the fibres and disconnecting it from the box in the morning and a few hours later the guy coming back and fixing it on the same day without me receiving any calls from Airtel whatsoever did receive a bunch of messages.

 

[Xposed]

Bhai @Halter how did you manage to get your static ip on prepaid, for me , they converted my connection to postpaid when I requested for static ip. Does the billing free trick work with postpaid connections?

 

[Halter]

So for me apparently since mine was a prepaid connection that too in a LCO served town and not directly by Airtel I know this cause the same guy provides Railtel connections here. Firstly when I asked them in the beginning when I installed the connection. I talked to their Leads to get me a Static IP connection, she was based out of Cuttack and my connection was the first one in town so the entire crew came into the house for installation. Later she told me over the call that it's not feasible in my town yet as only prepaid connections were possible that too with only speeds till 300megabits blah blah yada yada no Telephone. Later on, I saw Airtel Black launch in our town a couple months after. I called Airtel Support on Phone and told them to transfer my call to Airtel Black Support Team. I queried about their plans etc and then asked if getting a static IP was possible he said yes and then initiated a service request to convert my connection from prepaid to postpaid after which I started getting Dynamic Public IP and then for the next 14 days I waited till someone assigned me a Static IP from the backend. Several calls and emails to their head and leads they managed to give me a static IP after around 20 days of waiting since they said that the work for this is still going on and my town is still being worked upon for this Static IP service and the next day an Engineer came to visit my place around noon and checked the router etc I talked to him about the entire process how his day was and if he knew what he was doing and showed him the IP Assignments etc on the router page i.e the very next day the Engineer visited again and this time called someone in backend and after a while they assigned me a static IP and it's been working wonders since then. I've forwarded some of my applications on Port 80, 443 and other ports for my CS and Minecraft servers.

I've had the Static IP configuration for over 5 months now. I'm getting free 1 gigabit speeds all the time even during peak hours. Ping times have been very stable and reliable over the past year from Airtel there were occasional latency issues to Europe and Middle East Servers but it doesn't concern me much tbh. I mostly play CS2 and Valorant(sometimes) ping times are very nice around 40 - 50ms, although could be much nicer if they had POPS in BBSR which they do but their Broadband backend is from Kolkata NOC apparently no NOC setup for Broaband users in Odisha yet and it also seemingly holds true for Mobile users as well. However I've seen from what HC1337 mentioned earlier that some Local ISPS like SSCableNet and Wiretel have Airtel as their Upstream and they seem to be getting even less ping times to every server. Conclusion, the experience so far for me with Airtel in my town is 10/10 no issues no complains very nice experience.

 

[HC1337]

The thing is we do have a Nxtra POP here with Sify and CF peering AFAIK, but it just used for commercial connections and not for their own FTTH connections.

 

[Halter]

Hmm I wonder 5 years down the lane if they are going to change things and make POPS and IXPS and NOCs in Bhubaneswar. I think it will hugely benefit the amount of people it serves. No doubt Gamers will see most benefits in this as the ping times will go down by a huge margin. Also I read somewhere a couple months back there were propositions to setup Cable Landing Stations in Digha by Jio and one in Puri by Railtel Corporation of India now I'm not sure if they actual work is under way or it's just hot air but if it ever comes to fruition and gets utilized and shared by all the ISPs it would again bring down latencies to International servers like Singapore and other SEA locations.

Correct me if I'm wrong about any of this. That's what I've had in my mind so far it'll be Interesting to hear everyone's opinion about it here.