Airtel Xstream fiber expanding to Kottayam

[vignesh_venkatesan]

@GRanger That's one way to put it.

 

[Sammy]

The reason I said I felt like it was on par was because my friend in Bangalore has airtel and we pretty much get the same latency on games we play on so it never felt too off but I’ll agree that Airtel is way ahead of Jio in routing.

My guess is that once Jio’s IAX and IEX cables are done in 2-3 years, they will probably have comparable latency to TATA Comm but it’s Jio, so who knows

 

[rtr00t]

I absolutely agree with the fact that Airtel has the best routing, Network, QoS among Indian ISP's as they have carefully carried out expansion with upgrades to ensure Airtel's vision of 'premium' Network (Voice & Data). Let's all sink in to the fact that their services are priced above market average for almost all their offering. Even so, I would gladly give away the money with the QoS they provided, isolated technical & support issues excluded.
They have PoP in almost all major North American & European countries with well balanced transit partners and own cables running undersea.
Had Jio planned otherwise, Airtel would have been the biggest Network in India if they did not nuke the market with surprise plans to start the traffic war.

Coming to Jio's Network, I reserve my comments as I am yet to see what they are planning apart from the fact that they could not handle & resolve the increasing data requirement they themselves started. They do have the network to carry out operations smoothly but i think they might be shaping wireless data to prioritize wired broadband connections. They need the income from wired connections throughout the country to generate huge chunk of money it could bring in with Triple Play a future-proof setup.
But as of now their network is routing is cluttered with unnecessary routeings & paths which increases the latency.
I would wait until they expand their network to ~1,20,000KMs of OFC worldwide by 'bro' jio which they & most ISP's submitted. Whoever acquires this network will have upper hand due to worldwide footprint.

With new deal with FB, they indirectly get access to FB's PoP?

It's going to get very interesting.

I did not ignore TATA, they do have top notch network but they are not interested(it seems) in Consumer broadband segment that much but focusing on Business/Enterprise customers.

End of the day I would love to see healthy competition!

 

[philip]

This is an update for those who are in kottyam and all. Today I visited an airtel store in the main city itself . When I asked the representative about the xstream fibre connection he said till the lockdown situation they were aggressively expanding through the kottayam city ,now all the work is being halted and he had no idea when will the work be restarted ,but one thing he said for sure that they are planning to expand to all the parts of kottayam even the outskirts parts and hopefully within one year the whole kottyam will be covered ...

 

[rtr00t]

This is an update for those who are in kottyam and all. Today I visited an airtel store in the main city itself . When I asked the representative about the xstream fibre connection he said till the lockdown situation they were aggressively expanding through the kottayam city ,now all the work is being halted and he had no idea when will the work be restarted ,but one thing he said for sure that they are planning to expand to all the parts of kottayam even the outskirts parts and hopefully within one year the whole kottyam will be covered ...

This backs my previous statement that they are planning to launch atleast first 100 pincodes in kottayam. Yey to me

 

[Sammy]

@philip do you know if they’re doing underground cables? Because I know for a fact that Jio was not allowed to dig underground for setting up their infra in most parts of towns in Kerala.

 

[GR2]

I noticed that my city is listed 2 times(old and new name), wtf lol

 

[philip]

@philip do you know if they’re doing underground cables? Because I know for a fact that Jio was not allowed to dig underground for setting up their infra in most parts of towns in Kerala.

Yeah I have seen them digging one main road near to my residence In fact they were not digging the road itself but only the footpath portion, but how they are implementing to each household is still a confusion, but the customer rep is confident that they will surely expand to all areas

 

[philip]

By the way I have seen no signs of any jio fiber expansion here. ,not within the city itself

 

[Sammy]

Jio expansion in my area was done around Jan 2019, they literally did a 4-5km stretch on the main road next to my house in 2 nights.

Btw, I’m at my parents apartment in Ekm right now. They have an xstream connection, not seeing the best latency right now. Lmk if you want me to run any ping tests.