Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Tata Indicom broadband and wireless services - A Review

I have been a subscriber of Tata Indicom Broadband internet connection for more than a year now and Tata Indicom Walky wireless phone for 3 months and this is how I rate two of their products and service.

Tata Indicom Broadband Internet Service - 6/10 - One good bit is the low cost of the unlimited package at 560 INR/month. The speed of the connection (downloading) is only around 7 - 10 kilobytes per second. I'll give them a 5/10 for connection reliability - the line is usually down towards the end of the month for a few days. I have had to change my broadband modem and router thrice cause it konked out. Service and support gets a 2/10. Whenever I call, I hear the robotic voice saying that the waiting time is more than 12 minutes - please call again. It takes around 3 days for them to get the line up again and it took 3 weeks on an average to change the defective routers. Infact around 70 percent of calls made from my Tata Indicom Walky phone is to the internet call center for which I am charged.

Tata Indicom Walky Wireless Telephone - 1/10 - Since we got the phone in June, the only thing that ever worked was the inbuilt FM Radio. A week after installing the phone, outgoing calls were barred for non payment of bills. Apparently, the company had not noticed that we had paid the installation charges which took nearly a month for customer care to fix during which we could make no calls. Even after that we kept getting calls from the billing department - around 2 a day asking us to pay the cancelled bill and threatening disconnection which was downright annoying. Moreover, the connectivity sucked. The phone worked for a week and the inbuilt FM radio proved useful to hear a live broadcast of a FIFA World Cup match during a power cut. A few days later the phone refused to come on and was completely dead. We sent countless emails and phonecalls to the call center executives, whose accent both English and Hindi is indecipherable ( maybe the call center is somewhere in South East Asia). We visited the Tata Indicom showroom in Connaught Place where we were given a flimsy receipt on a scrap of paper. It took more than a month and a half for them to send a guy with a replacement phone - the awful part being the new phone had no FM radio. If the bills were'nt being reimbursed by the office, I'd chuck the phone in the trash.

I had not expected this from a company like Tata - Reliance were supposed to be the 'thugs'.

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3 comments:

  1. I myself work for a Tata company and find this really disappointing that I am saying something bad about Tata Indicom but I have been let down way too often. I have had really bad experiences with Tata Indicom that you can read here
    "Customer is King? My a%&$"

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  2. I know I must be the millionth individual who's taken the time off to post a WORD OF CAUTION against Tata Indicom Broadband Internet(WiMax). Nonetheless, I couldn't stop my right to freedom of opinion and speech.
    After persistant telemarketing, I gave in to one such telemarketing executive named Salma(08032409061) on 23rd Sep, 2008. I received the connection the very next day but how. First, the guys who were supposed to hook up the connection promised to be at my place at 11:00 am. But they eventually did at 7:45pm. To my surprise, the so called "engineers" (9916027144)were no more than 7th std. drop-outs who knew nothing about telecom. It was a circus at my place when these two people tried everything possible to set up the connection. Finally they realised that the issue was that the wiring was not in tact. Hufff!! Just the beginning. Day 2 the connection disappears. So I called customer service (customer service my @$$). It was a 2 hr 14 min call which ended in booking a complaint. The engineer comes home to sort the issue (Narender Kumar-9241097261).Funny! He lies down on my sofa, puts his legs up and tries his luck at fixing the problem. He calls the back-end and speaks in Tamil assuming that I wouldn't understand. He uses all sorts of foul language and speaks ill about the customers. First I was given a "static" connection. So in Tamil, he tells the back-end, let's change the connection to "dynamic" which will temporarily sort the issue. Then when I will call back tomorrow, there's be another technician who'll be assigned to do the job. All this while, I just held myself back from telling him to get the XXXX out of my house. I was so frustrated that I just wanted to get this right, that's it. Again, the connection works fine for about 1 hour and disappears. I try try and fail to get any kind of assistance. By now, my phone bill too must have gone up by a few hundreds. Just a while ago, I called customer service again and was with this agent from Hyderabad for about 50 min. This is when I realised something. I SHOULD HAVE TAKEN THESE REVIEWS SERIOUSLY. I SHOULD HAVE LISTENED TO ALL WHAT YOU HAD TO SAY AND JUST STAY AWAY FROM THIS SERVICE. Hope you don't make the same mistake!! I'm gonna try Reliance now :)

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  3. Review:Tata Indicom Broadband Infinity 512 Postpaid

    Firstly This plan is supposed to be a post-paid plan but thats a LIE. Its actually a prepaid plan. So in a sense all plans at Tata Indicom Boradband are prepaid plans!! DO NOT buy any postpaid plans from them!! All post-paid plans are in essense Prepaid.

    I paid 6620 in advance for 4 months of rental. At the end of 3 month I was sent a bill of 1800 rupees. On calling the help-desk I was told that the 1 month is taken as advance rental and will be "adjusted" at the time of disconnection. On being asked if I disconnect the connection today, will the remaining amount be returned to me. The answer was NO. The amount will only be "adjusted". On asking him to clarify on what adjusted means, he asked me to write a e-mail to the customer support for clarifications. Needless to say, God only know when e-mails will be replied to.

    Since the last date for payment at any time is 15 days after the bill is generated, you will never be able to make use of internet equal to the amount of money that you have paid. Thats pretty cool for Tata’s point of view. They are actually running the business on stolen money. Stolen because you never agreed to pre-pay.


    The speed is supposed to be 512 kbps, but at any given point of time the download speed hovers about 50 kbps only.


    The connectivity is really unreliable. It goes down many times a day and the common refrain from the customer support is that the "server is down". This is a NO GO for those running SOHOs.


    The customer help desk is actually very unhelpful. Firstly it takes many calls to even get through to the billing department. Actually I realized that their work timings might be different from normal human beings. They are unreachable before 11 AM, and after 4:30 PM.

    Go for it only at your own peril.

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