How Airtel become worst cellular company in India

Disclaimer : Following is not meant to be a hate/insult review. But is my personal experience in real life. I am not affiliated to any cellular company at the time of writing this article. If you have any problem/complaints regarding the content of this article, please use contact page on this website. Due to massive email requests and busy schedules, I may not respond to all of the emails.

If you know me for last 8 years, only thing I never changed is my personal mobile number. I was Airtel fan since I started using mobile. Their extended support for not just calls and SMS but data plans attracted a lot of youth. But good people are not always good. And now it’s Airtel who turned bad ass. If you need more clarity they have turned worst than Indian post office!

It’s not the time people had to stick with one cellular company like it was once. I brought Airtel sim when it costed near a thousand rupees. Now any sim is free of cost and plans and offers are everywhere the way you need it. Now I use one personal and another private sim, one for iPad and three landlines as in two offices and one at home besides my Vodafone mobile which is used for business. Ohh yea, last month I cancelled one Airtel broadband with landline and switched to MTS Mblaze, which gives me better stability. I believe it’s time to move on the rest as well. Here is why.

Airtel is in loss, so they are trying to juice existing customers and regain stability. If you get crappy SMS alerts which give you no use, remember you are being charged. Even if you don’t activate it, Airtel automatically does it for you! And not every customer care executives can find what’s active on your account. So keep calling them every day to see if anything is activated. Ohh wait, they will charge you for calling customer care too. That is, to solve an issue created by them, you need to spend your time and money! WTF!! It’s my personal experience. Listen to conversations I had two times with Airtel CC. First guy didn’t know what’s active on my number. On Second time call they says SMS alert was active for a long time and they refuse refund. Dear Airtel, you lost the first balls here.

Now it’s Airtel broadband. If you check my twitter timeline, you can see every month at least twice I tweet my Airtel broadband is down. Every time they say different reasons. Mostly being cable cut. Why don’t they fucking get some good shit to replace the poor quality cables? They have a reason. It’s outsourced. Bengali daily waged people are the once who aligns the connection. They do it like it’s just rope! Now another argument is that modem malfunction. When we took connection, we brought it from Airtel. Now that’s too outsourced. So if you have a complaint for modem, you better replace it with new one without telling anyone. Because nobody at Airtel knows where to complain or what to do when modem is not working. Recently I brought MTS Mblaze, which gives me better speed than 2mbps Airtel ever gave. So I recommend it than Airtel BB and specially Mblaze is wireless so no hassle with Bengalis who don’t know Malayalam or how to cable properly.

Airtel Landline is fun. They can give you connection. But won’t provide a phone! Last year, I brought 7 Tata Indicom landlines with zero upfront payment and APBX with automated call routing. Airtel wasn’t capable of proving single landline connection that time because they didn’t have free sockets available. They asked for 20 days time more time after I waited for one week hearing their promise. But later I took one connection with BB and phone. Now, they don’t provide phone when you take a new connection. The same phone device that TATA gave last year, Airtel is charging for it. I said fuck it; I’ll buy a good one from store.

Customer care people are worst than post office people. It’s not that I have any personal enmity with anyone at post office. When I was kid, I used to go post office for paying my home BSNL bills. They were treating people like we are in some refugee camp begging for food form their home. May be its just that post officers or may be it’s that it is the only Govnt office I walked in several times. I haven’t been in post office for years now. Not sure if I will ever walk in again. Post offices are so dead for me. Now everything is online and courier services are good at speed. Now back to Airtel customer care.

Last week I was traveling through Ernakulam – Kannur – Chennai – Bangalore – Kannur. I use Airtel sim on my iPad so that I can access on Demand 3G when I’m away from wifi. It worked fine till I reached Chennai. Then all of a sudden data is not available. I thought it’s because of Roaming. But everyone offers free 3G data roaming. It was not sorted when I came back home. So I tried USSD query to see if it connects. It failed with no response. Then I called to its number from another phone. It said my number is temporarily blocked!! Time for another WTF!!

I called customer care, one Mr. Yasser tried to help me and said someone reported sim missing on this number and so my sim was blocked! I asked who reported and when? He didn’t have answer and I asked to connect me to seniors. He said ok, and I waited few minutes then he came back and said top teams aren’t available. He promised to fix it in an hour and I asked him to send confirmation on my personal number as iPad can’t receive SMS and calls. He said he don’t have its facility to call another number even if it’s the number I’m calling to complain! I asked him to call me manually from his phone. He said he can’t call. (WTF!) I belied it will fix that night. Because I had to book tickets next morning at 8 when the IRCTC Tatkal opens. Bullshit happened next day, it was still blocked. As I don’t plan for an alternative connection, I got one hour delayed to book ticket and my mom and I had to travel in Chennai Mail general coach from Kannur. We got wait listed AC reservation only due to the delay in booking. A sleep less journey! (WTF). I called customer care for 3rd time to solve the block issue, this time a lady said she just unblocked my number and it will be active in an hour. It didn’t happen for now when I’m writing this, which is 24+ hours after that call. Now I’m in Chennai, I can’t call Customer Care. It gives no option to talk to them. Just IVR. But
I just got one advertising call from Airtel comedy while I’m roaming. No comments on it than WTF!

Later that day, I got two calls from Airtel saying they saw my complaints on twitter and they are checking what the reason it got blocked is. Anyways, I’m going to buy new sim from BSNL for iPad. Fuck Airtel.