[Thyag]

Originally Posted by tbppjpr

I wonder how can one be in the situation of puzzled billing for mobile services in the era of unlimited calling facility available at fixed price plans

I have handson experience with them, took me more than 3 months to cancel their so called broadband plan and paid those 3 months bill although the service provided in total were not even 10 days. After cancellation, through another user came to know that area was not under their feasibility but still they gave the connection to milk from users like us.

Many horror stories have been shared by my friends and relatives regarding the addition of subscriptions & sevices without informing the network users. Fastag is another drama by this useless organisation !

I am so happy that you had & have good service from them, I wish & pray that it continues till they close shop

[Gansan]

Originally Posted by SmartCat

BSNL has a bloated employee list

OT
I own an apartment in a gated community at a different locality, but don't live there. There is a big cellphone tower on the terrace of one of the blocks for more than ten years, the rent for which supplements the society revenues. I recently went there for a meeting when a section of inmates wanted to remove the tower and the others wanted to retain it, but at a higher rent. I interacted with one of the representatives from the tower company. And was surprised to learn all tower companies must provide a free space for BSNL transmiters on all towers. Totally free, no rent can be charged as per government orders. Did not know about this before.

[Thad E Ginathom]

Everybody's mileage varies.

I have had mostly good experience with Airtel. We take fibre broadband from them, and it runs faster than advertised.

My wife has a long-held postpaid airtel number. I do wonder why she pays so much more than I do for prepaid, but I think other companies do that too.

This I will admit. Airtel built their business on customer service. We were so glad to see airtel lay cables in our street and could escape from BSNL! But having built their business they dropped the service.

But when it works, it works well. And mostly, it works.

Charging for unwanted services also seems to be a common scam. I cannot keep any account balance on my vi phone, apart for the paid-for plan. I get messaging saying Thank you for using this service you never heard of let alone asked for and that balance disappears. It is nothing short of theft, surely. And if they do the same thing with millions of customers, must be a substantial earner.

[RunGaDa]

Jio. For this reason - Jio cellphone towers are better than Airtel.
But you may want to go with Airtel / BSNL depending on the coverage you get in the area you stay.
I prefer to use Jio and have kept one reserve phone with Airtel SIM.
I use the Airtel along with Jio in my travels as some places you cannot find connectivity for Jio.

[Joe367]

Originally Posted by dragonfire

Amd surprised why they let BSNL die and prop up Jio in their place. Instead they should have sold BSNL to Reliance and probably coerced VI to sell themselves to Adani. We would have had at least 3 players to choose from.

It's like govt is not even hiding how they're favouring jio. I remember BSNL rolled out 4G services in Perumbavoor, nearest one to my hometown, in Kerala about 4 Years ago. No progress have been made since. The data plans were cheaper than the ones from jio or Airtel .

Monopoly is never good for us consumers, for this reason alone wer'e just holding onto our BSNL sim cards hoping they would rollout 4G some time.

[KHegde]

Hello Everybody,

I would like to share my Experience over Multiple Telecom Providers, in a Timeline:

1997-2004/5- Spice Telecom - Good Coverage within Bangalore City Limits. Hutch - Excellent Service with Good Network Coverage.

Hutch was taken over by Vodafone. Excellent Network with Good Data Speeds. However, after a few years the Service & Network was bad.

Acquired New BSNL Number in 2008 specifically for usage during Trips to our Hometown in Kundapur, South Karnataka. Excellent Coverage. Ported this Number to Jio in 2020/21 due to Better Offers & 4G Coverage. Jio, alongwith Airtel, are now Offering 5G. BSNL are still on 3G.

Ported Vodafone Number to Airtel sometime in 2014/15. The Service & Network is Good with some Areas closer to our Residence in North Bangalore experiencing Patchy Networks occasionally.

[thomahawk]

I have both Jio (ported from BSNL since OTP's were delayed) and Airtel. Like Jio more since they support smart watches with e-sim by tagging it your phone's SIM. Airtel's seems to be limited to iOS/Apple Watch (not sure if that is still the case though). Jio also has some unlimited 5G data as an introductory offer and the 5G coverage is great.

Don't bother with door step service (unless you live in a Town/City) - the agent never showed up and just like you, I also got a cancellation message when I booked a SIM online; Walk into a store or Reliance Digital and they will set it up in few minutes including KYC.

[sukhbirST]

While I do agree with the views against bsnl, we must wait till 4G is launched in next few months. Never write them off, as they are still more reliable when working. Also remember they are far affordable for the common man. Must realise making calls and data usage are still 2 different things.

[ike]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

Sheesh, Jio, all I want is a prepaid SIM, is it this difficult? Your service apparently sucks, right from the off.

I use Jio in Chennai, my advise is to go with airtel. Jio coverage is not that great in my experience, probably increased patronage has loaded their systems now. Perhaps even the customer care. Bear in mind that in the initial days Jio data was solid and I used only whatsapp calls since it was as good, if not better than the voice calls. In my office (opposite Kamakshi hospital), Jio has very poor coverage while airtel folks can take calls even inside the lifts.

At my home in Chitlapakkam near Tambaram, Jio is spotty. Glad I'm in Chennai only for 10 days a month.

[Candy$Cars]

My experience has been better with Airtel than Jio. I keep an active Airtel sim and a secondary jio sim.
What I have experienced - Where Jio works, Airtel also works; where jio doesn't work, Airtel more likely works and where airtel doesn't work, jio also doesn't work. So, I like Airtel more.
Case in point - often on long highway stretches, songs stop playing & buffering on Jio but airtel has been more reliable.
Obviously this is my experience, yours can definitely vary.

One good thing about Jio is that they allow incoming calls & sms even if no plan is activated. The buggers at Airtel block even incoming calls & sms after 5 days if no plan is activated.

[RGK]

Sir,

I have been using Vi for more than 21 years, and it is good (my usage is primarily in Chennai and the western parts of TN). Many say Jio performs very well in certain areas, and Airtel is standard across all places. I saw a passenger who travelled with me to Coimbatore and used an Airtel dongle (throughout by attending calls continuously) without any disruption.

Slightly OT here about BSNL Internet Services,

I sent an email about their services nine years ago and a few weeks ago on the same email thread. Unfortunately, they have not yet improved, but I heard from some reliable sources that they are getting equipped to face the Fiber & the 5G war.

[meerkat]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

Everybody's mileage varies.

Yes it does, -- and in the present context, it depends majorly on the location.

I have had mostly good experience with Airtel.
....

My wife has a long-held postpaid airtel number. I do wonder why she pays so much more than I do for prepaid, but I think other companies do that too. ....

My displeasure with Airtel (and with Vodafone) stems exactly from this reason, -- their constant push towards postpaid and denial of services for prepaid, even resorting to blatant lies.

IIRC, when Aadhaar linkage to mobile numbers was mandated, my Airtel customer service informed me that it could only be done if my prepaid connection was changed to postpaid first! I walked out, and headed straight to Jio with an MNP request to Jio prepaid which was done smoothly. I swore never to have anything to do with Airtel ever again (but my Samsung phone had the Airtel app preinstalled which could not be uninstalled :-)).

But when it works, it works well. And mostly, it works.

Although I am no fan of the Jio customer service, that's exactly my view on my Jio prepaid connection :-). Service interruptions are rare, even if the speed is not always great.

Charging for unwanted services also seems to be a common scam. I cannot keep any account balance on my vi phone, apart for the paid-for plan. I get messaging saying Thank you for using this service you never heard of let alone asked for and that balance disappears. It is nothing short of theft, surely. And if they do the same thing with millions of customers, must be a substantial earner.

There used to be a myth about BSNL that, being Government owned, they never resorted to such practices. However my experience has been otherwise. At the time of plan renewal each time, they never kept their "grace period" promise, and within a day or two deducted a few rupees from my balance, and extended my service for a few days at a time without ever asking me! They even deducted for some phantom SMS to some unknown number in the middle of the night when I was fast asleep! And of course, there was never any reversal to such deductions, BSNL being BSNL. Now I'm left with less than Rs. 2 balance, and never top-up. I keep the number alive at the lowest possible cost, hence BSNL (still), -- and TINA for me (beyond Jio and BSNL).

And oh ..., -- Jio has thankfully put an end to another long-running scam (practised by all other players, including BSNL), -- that of forfeiting any remaining already-paid-for service with a fresh recharge! It boggles my mind how such practices were ever permitted!
.

[Thad E Ginathom]

Originally Posted by meerkat

IIRC, when Aadhaar linkage to mobile numbers was mandated, my Airtel customer service informed me that it could only be done if my prepaid connection was changed to postpaid first! I walked out ...

I used to say to people having trouble with bureaucrats that "In India, the law is what the officer sitting in front of you says it is." I fear that that is very true of telecoms-industry staff.

When Airtel (and, I think the rest of the industry) decided not to allow unused sims to continue with lifetime validity, I had (and still have) an Airtel sim in my tablet. It was almost never used for calls, but I had put maybe 12 months plan on it, and there was a substantial period of time outstanding. It got cancelled. We visited an Airtel branch and told our woes to a woman there. She made a phone call and said, nothing it can be done. That sim is cancelled and the number will be reused,

Somehow, with the earnestness of my request, I got her on my side, and she made several more phone calls. The number was restored. But if I hadn't refused to give up...

Many foreign visitors, visiting branches that not at or near airports, etc, face a refusal of a sim. Can't be done. Well, yes, of course it can be done. We took two British visitors to such a branch. I don't think I could have achieved it in English, but my wife cajoled in Tamil, and the necessary information was found out from their bosses. Once the guy knew it could be done and how, it was done: within 15 minutes they had working sims.

The biggest thing I celebrated, having moved from BSNL to Airtel, was the absence of the ever-open hand, the strong inference that if I wanted the job done, I had to grease the palm of the guy. Airtel employed engineers who asked nothing and accepted nothing. That is slipping in the opposite direction now, as Airtel is using independent contractors. Sad.

[meerkat]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

...

The biggest thing I celebrated, having moved from BSNL to Airtel, was the absence of the ever-open hand, the strong inference that if I wanted the job done, I had to grease the palm of the guy. Airtel employed engineers who asked nothing and accepted nothing. That is slipping in the opposite direction now, as Airtel is using independent contractors. Sad.

I used to work for an American MNC in Bangalore. Before the time of cell phones arrived, my company used to provide BSNL landlines at employees' homes.

I needed to shift to an apartment right above the one I had been living in. So the landline connection needed to be shifted too. No big deal, -- it just needed disconnecting the BSNL wires from one set of wires going to the old apartment to another set (meant for the new apartment) only a few inches apart inside the building shaft for cables.

An application for the shift was submitted to the relevant BSNL office by my company along with all supporting documents and the requisite fee.

--- Weeks passed, with nothing happening. Now I was supposed to follow it up with BSNL to get it done. I was new to Bangalore, and new to working life in India. So my local coleagues advised me about what was going on. And of course, it needed greasing of palms if I wanted to get it done soon! --- I was not willing to do that.

So, I got my hands into the building shaft, and did the few minutes' job of disconnection and reconnection of the relevant wires myself! --- Job done, and my phone in the new apartment started working. Easy! And I was happy.

So, of course, I bragged about it to my coleagues. To my surprise, they were not impressed! I had done something illegal, and I could get in trouble with BSNL!

Scared, I undid what I had done to get my phone working, -- but I was not going to grease any palms (this attitude has made many things very difficult for me in India all my life, but I can honestly hold my head high, -- to myself)!

Finally, a full 3 months after application for the shift and fee payment, BSNL gave up, and completed the job without bribes! I didn't really have to go through much hardship for the lack of a phone at home, because I was living alone, and spent most of my waking hours at work.



---- My American MNC had to maintain a separate department staffed with local people to keep things running "smoothly" with various government departments in Bangalore! I have no idea how the necessary grease money was acounted for in the company books! All I know is that the US staff in the know used to laugh about this additional cost of doing business in India, and that made me feel very proud as an Indian!

The top people of this special department earned much more than us poor engineers, and used to flaunt their costly house and such too (that we couldn't even dream of buying ourselves)!

The whole idea of opening a design center in India meant cost savings for my company compared to the US. So indirectly this additional cost of doing business in India actually came out of the paychecks of us engineers of a technology company, whether or not we paid any grease money directly out of our pockets ourselves!
.

[Fuldagap]

Originally Posted by meerkat

Scared, I undid what I had done to get my phone working, -- but I was not going to grease any palms (this attitude has made many things very difficult for me in India all my life, but I can honestly hold my head high,) -- to myself!

"...Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake...."

Originally Posted by meerkat

Finally, a full 3 months after application for the shift and fee payment, BSNL gave up, and completed the job without bribes! I didn't really have to go through much hardship for the lack of a phone at home, because I was living alone, and spent most of my waking hours at work.

A similar incident happened with me more than a decade back. I joined a bank in a rural area in Maharashtra. I started living in the village itself instead of the nearest city which was approx 50Kms away to save time and energy. The per month rent of the nice house that I surprisingly got in that area was peanuts too. The great quality milk and the fresh air were a blessing in disguise.

The first thing that I got was a broadband connection from BSNL. The village now had 3 broadband connections, one was the gram panchayat's, one was mine and the other was the leased line from BSNL for the bank's branch.

I started living in the house only when the broadband became functional, which took only 2 days, before which I spent time in the nearest city's hotel. It was a Monday.

I couldn't have asked for more, given that I loved the work, the surrounding atmosphere, people and the milk and the broadband by BSNL that worked like a charm. The house was fantastic too, called a bungalow in local parlance.

The fun was interrupted as soon as the weekend arrived. The broadband stopped working when I woke up Saturday morning. I tried to find the mobile numbers of people concerned but no help was rendered it being a weekend. 2 days of the weekend I felt like meditating as the mobile connectivity of the Idea SIM too that I had was quite limited. Nothing much to do except sip tea and read a book for 2 days. Monday morning the broadband started working again and I thanked all the BSNL people I had phoned last Saturday and Sunday. However, this became a thing every weekend. I noticed that the broadband would stop working every Friday late evening and it would start every Monday morning. BSNL guys gave me all sorts of excuses which could or could not be true. The nearest BSNL exchange was in the taluka which was approx 22 Kms away. Exhausted, I took out time from the bank one weekday and visited the exchange. They made me run pillar to post to try and make me understand that BSNL is not at fault and there is some strange reason for this mishap every weekend.

I visited them once more the following week but no help or resolution to the problem was rendered. Even emails to the higher ups through the BSNL website went useless.

I called a friend who worked at DOT in Delhi and he simply advised me to register a complaint on the CPGRAMS portal.
I did that and he told me to wait 45 days. 15 days or so passed and one morning a Tata Sumo filled with 6-7 BSNL people arrived and met me at the bank itself. They profusely apologised and requested me never to escalate the complaints to the higher ups. I don't remember what the top most personnel of a BSNL exchange is called, but he personally met me and made me promise never to escalate the issues so much because they have to answer a lot afterwards and shared his personal mobile number so that any future issues can be personally taken up by him.

For the problem, they told me in the evening that they worked the whole day and have sorted it out and I would never face any problems with connectivity again. I took it with a pinch of salt but indeed the problem was sorted out, whatever it was, the BSNL broadband started working flawlessly day in and day out.

I being a curious person could not digest that there was some technical issue which the team that visited before had sorted and believed that the issue was something else. I was right. One day I saw the BSNL employee of the village perched high up a pole. I called him out and tried to talk to him. His name was Jarli. He belonged to a nearby village of the same name. Jarli was a little drunk and was speaking very nicely. He said he knew I worked in the bank and asked me if I faced any problems with the broadband again. I told him that a team had visited and they had sorted out a technical issue. He smiled, apologised and told me that there was no technical issue and it was Jarli's fault that I had faced conncetivity issues on weekends.

Mr Jarli was a celebrated govt employee who had no to very less work at hand. He had a bike to commute daily to my village from his. My village had its own very small but fully equipped BSNL exchange. Jarli was the only employee there and was the top boss therefore. Mr Jarli had the habit of taking full weekends off and before leaving his work every Friday evening, he used to turn the electricity supply off to 'avert' any untoward issues over the weekends so that he can enjoy his weekends with pleasure at home.

The team had got to know this when they had made the visit previously and the top boss from the nearby taluka's BSNL exchange told him to not enjoy his weekends so much, lest he wanted more such complaints from my side.

So Mr. Jarli stopped doing what he used to do earlier and I got uninterrupted, superb BSNL broadband service for the rest of the tenure that I spent in that beautiful village. The village exchange was equipped with a DG set which was a backup in case of hydel power cut. Along with the DG set were a number of UPS. I faced zilch issues after this was taken care of.

Mr Jarli became a good friend and used to visit my branch for occasional tea in the afternoons.

When we installed a Hughes VSAT for our ATM that we shifted from inside the branch to outside later on, Mr Jarli went out of his way to help us out in every which way possible to get the job done in one day, though, being a BSNL employee he had no obligation whatsoever to help out.

Originally Posted by meerkat

---- My American MNC had to maintain a separate department staffed with local people to keep things running "smoothly" with various government departments in Bangalore! I have no idea how the necessary grease money was acounted for in the company books! All I know is that the US staff in the know used to laugh about this additional cost of doing business in India, and that made me feel very proud as an Indian!

The top people of this special department earned much more than us poor engineers, and used to flaunt their costly house and such too (that we couldn't even dream of buying ourselves)!

Sir this is quite common throughout the country. PR department people need to maintain friendly relations with local authorities including the police to keep the ball rolling for the company. It is no mean feat for the said department's employees too. Greasing of palms gets the work done for private players, is no hidden truth. However sad it might sound. Corporates take care in cash and kind of the so called govt people, keeping them entertained through any means possible. Using companies' guest houses for a VIP at the request of a local authority is an example. In lieu, the company gets to function flawlessly and gets help when it gets rough in any matter. It is what it is.