So as promised here I am after using Tikona more than a month with my honest review about this ISP.
Before you continue reading please understand that this is my personal experience, I am not speaking from a general stand-point and you should consider researching yourself before taking any ISP.
By the end of the day reviews of anything are personal experience and it varies person-to-person. So with that said lets dive right into Tikona ISP review for
JP Nagar 8th Phase - Nayak Layout - Banaglore. I will break it down into chunks.
There is a slight holding time till you get connected & its not very prompt like Airtel but its good and the people you speak to are cordial.
- Connection Stability:- Stable.
After a week of installation I got a downtime of 1 hour and after that till the point of writing this review I haven't had any disconnection of any sort until now. The downtime was because of some error in Bangalore server, at least that's what the customer service representative told me.
- Speed:- Very Good (this one will be a long review)
Downloading & Browsing
When I say 'very good' I am talking from a 4.0/mbps speed stand point. When shifting to
8th Phase JP NGR my biggest concern was speed. I work on
VPN and I need 2.0/mbps the least to get my work done and I am 24/7 connected to the web. Like every other Indian, I was really concerned about taking any ISP connection apart from Airtel. However when these guys say 4.0/mbps they mean it. I get uninterrupted browsing speed of 3.2/mbps - 3.6/mbps. And my file transfers through VPN to Chennai & Mumbai are good (
not that fast but I can live with it). When I say file transfer I am not talking about
MS Word or PDF. I work in the VFX industry and I am transferring gigabytes of data for feature film work. An example would be (vaguely) -
8-9GIG of data output from Chennai studio's data-base comes to my workstation within
5hrs-6hrs and for me that's more than enough.
Skype calls & GoToMeeting works flawless even on international calls. Youtube and vimeo are fast, no buffering even on HD.
Sites I open like Artstation or Behance are really fast even though they are heavy.
On torrent downloads, depending on where you are downloading from - the speed varies and I get around 800-900/kbps in torrent. Sometimes if the seeds are more I get around 1.2/mbps - so this is okay. However before coming to
8th Phase I used use 8.0/mbps Airtel and the torrent download speed was around 1.4/mbps.
I don't know if I am right, but I think downloads in India is capped with certain ratio.
My JDownloader 2.0 gives me 1.2/mbps speed almost constantly. Its faster than torrents (
at least for me).
Uploading
We are cursed forever with a capped uploading. Well its frankly okay, this is true even for Airtel. Uploading in Indian ISP is a pain and Tikona is no different. Since I use VPN its not a big deal but if I need to upload something it takes a while. That's the short and direct review about uploading. I am not sure how ACT or other ISP providers are. I have used Airtel, currently subscribed to BSNL and TIKONA and all these ISP have around 512/kbps upload speed or something.
Bill payment is very straight forward like Airtel or any other. Bill generates on every
7th, so does your FUP. I had a speed fluctuation after my FUP got over for the first time and believe it or not for three days I enjoyed 9.0/mbps speed and if any one is wondering how I have the time to write this long review its because all my work has been uploaded and downloaded and I am a little free because of that fluctuation. I downloaded a lot in three days. On steam I downloaded almost 40 GB of free games. I called up customer care to confirm they won't charge me and they have no idea about it. I got lucky and I hope I get lucky every time my FUP gets over
🙂
On the third day - afternoon I was pushed down to a pathetic fall to 512/kbps.
When you log into your account you can see all your usage data and your FUP limits. Everyday you must log-in to your Tikona server once (irritating for two days then you get used to it).
I am posting few links to videos I have recorded for people and screenshots.
So hopefully my review will help someone, I am not sure how Tikona is on a long run. I have been using it for around 40 days and I am satisfied. If there are any problems I promise to write about it here.
I recommend anyone living in 8th Phase to go with Tikona. So over all on a scale of
10.0 I give Tikona
7.5
And that is because of the stupid upload speed.
Here is a video I recorded of how Tikona browsing works -
About Tikona - govindkrishna's library
And few images: