Considering Airtel for broadband internet service? Think again

Getting broadband set up at home has been a trial over the past couple of weeks. It feels like a scene out of the Money Pit. 2 more days turns into a week and a half long affair... and the ordeal is still not over. 

It was 2 weeks of dealing with technical issues. Every promise to get the service set up was met with another promise of setting up the service the next day. Customer service is extremely unhelpful. All they offer to do is take down my complaint and give me a complaint number. Ask to speak to a manager and you're put on hold until the phone line gets disconnected. To add insult to injury, the last time I tried calling customer support from my cell phone the message I got was "support has been withdrawn for this line, please dial customer support from your land line". Ironic because I was calling about how they hadn't set up the land line yet!

But the cherry on this sundae has to be the fact that we were told the broadband service was "unlimited" when we signed up. Airtel failed to mention the fact that the download speed degrades to 256 kbps after the first 8GB of data. Interesting how they omitted this key piece of information. When you bring up this issue with Airtel, all I get is "but sir, it is unlimited - you can download at 256 kbps as much as you would like".

Perhaps it's common knowledge that there are no unlimited Airtel plans without degradation available for home connections here in Bangalore, but one would hope that something like this would be mentioned on the the brochure that Airtel provided us with. Seems like Bangalore operates on a "buyer beware" paradigm. Lesson learned.

I've come to terms with the fact that their sales staff screwed up and that there are frankly few other options for people like me. So I'm just going to have to suck it up and continue dealing with Airtel. (I'm not willing to just cancel the service and deal with another 2 weeks of no internet). What is the equivalent of a Better Business Bureau here in India? I need more options besides tweeting or blogging about how frustrating this experience has been.

Returning Home

Scribbles on the Margins has been dormant for the last 2 years; it sort of got left behind in the rush of the last couple of years in grad school. Now that I'm back in India (for good) I'm going to attempt to resuscitate this blog.

I've been in Bangalore for just a few days, basically trying to settle in. The move from NYC was fairly painless, thanks to a very helpful Pakistani cab driver who broke a number of traffic regulations to get me to Newark on time (no more Holland tunnel traffic for me). On the other hand, I think I'll be grateful if cabbies in Bangalore adhered to traffic regulations once in a while.

We're still struggling to get broadband access at home, we've been told it'll get done in the next 2 days. But then again, that's what we were told 10 days ago. So keeping my fingers crossed on that one.

I'll end this post with what my very friendly Pakistani cab driver told me when he found out I was returning home for good. The beauty is lost in the translation to English, but in essence he said that we immigrant desi's are like fresh water fish now - we die when we go back into the salty ocean.

Here's to hoping that I'm not allergic to salt!