Airtel 4G speed capped to under 10 mbps again?

  • Thread starter Thread starter vishalrao
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Investing in backend these days and in a country like India is a suicide. This is the only reason why FTTH hasn't been common till now. Every single day a new new policy gets framed benefiting few and penalizing others. With the ever growing competition and changing technology face, Operators are now really afraid to Invest.
 
Well it looks like they will be getting less money from me for now going forward.

I am on the Rs 2k plan (30 GB monthly data limit) and used to regularly add on smartbytes packs of 1k or 2k extra per month thanks to the high speed and doing things like watching 1080p and even 4K UHD youtube videos, but now that the speed is capped, I've stopped doing that.

This month I don't feel the need to topup extra data, so Airtel are losing that extra Rs 1k-2k "ARPU" kind thing, at least from me. I hope they realise a drop in revenue and figure out they need to restore the full speeds and not artificially limit stuff, for their own good.

I dunno what brilliant people are there making such decisions, they should be bitchslapped for being consumer-unfriendly.
 
One possibility I just thought of is that Airtel must have started other LTE bands in Pune (Maharashtra) like 1800mhz and the CPE device which supports other bands might be locking on to the slow 1800 mhz one due to better signal strength.

I did notice the "SINR" (signal to noise ratio) number go up from 10-12 dB to 18-19 dB since the speed drop around Jan 8th also when there were issues latching on to the usual tower CELL ID.

Sadly, there isn't an option on the device settings to force it to connect to the fast 2300 mhz band (and it doesn't show this info anywhere) so if this is what's happening then we're out of luck.

Hopefully they launch CA (carrier aggregation) and new CPE devices which support CA for higher speeds soon enough.

Where I stay there doesn't seem to be any hope even in the future for fast wired broadband options, so it will have to either be Airtel's or JIO's 4G.
 
Not a possibility but a truth. I was also trying to do some tests with the CPE Sim yesterday evening and to my surprise most of the time (90%) the device (phone) was latching to Band 3 (1800mhz) and not Band 40. Even at the location where the router is always kept, it latched to Band3. Only for few split seconds while i was roaming on the terrace from corner to corner to see check better signal strength, it did latch to band 40 but that was just for less than a min. If my observation is correct, they have configured the band40 on basis of distance. It does connect to Band40 as a priority over Band 3 but you need to about 200-250m circle radius range from the tower which makes sense as band40 signal degrades pretty fast over distance. Really wish that some real bad ass techie at the backend implements something for the CPE devices maybe a software upgrade where some bands can be disabled.
 
Yup, hoping for a firmware upgrade for the CPE device which will allow choosing the band, but they apparently only recently sent out a new firmware update, so not sure if/when another one will get released.

Or better yet, in my own opinion, launch CA with new CA-enabled CPE devices, I wouldn't mind buying that.
 
Well, I'll be damned :D Fingers crossed - my speed issue is resolved and stays this way!

I was resigned to the prospect of low speeds but just took a shot and sent a fresh email to [email protected] CC address with a simple message saying I am getting slow speeds since 1-2 months where as before I was getting 30-40 mbps now I am getting only 5-8 mbps and to please restore my speed.

Got a callback from CC executive who initially started usual approach saying they will create a service ticket for engineer to visit my place to check - I told this guy politely that your local engineers have already checked my router and tower signal etc everything is normal at my side - I said it looks like your backend network engineers should check something (I didn't mention anything about 1800 vs 2300 band) he agreed and said he will create the ticket and assign it directly to backend networking team.

Now within a day or two my speeds are back up to 30-40 mbps and I didn't see any change in the details like tower ID number or signal strength so maybe in backend they were able to configure speed for me maybe force my device to connect to only 2300 band or something like that.

Further to that, I got a call another day later from someone saying he was from network team who said something about infrastructure work in progress and to wait for 5-6 days everything will become normal (note already my speed was back up to 30-40 mbps) so I thanked him and they closed the ticket.

Just to clarify, I am still getting under 10 mbps on fast.com (earlier it was fine) but when I do extensive speed tests on various locations most are fast (30-40 mbps) while a few are still slow (under 10 mbps) - even speedtest.googlefiber.net site (to Atlanta, USA) shows full speed for me.

I wonder if there is some international connectivity/routing issue between various cable systems which causes some places to be fast and others to be slow but at least "local" stuff like youtube, windows updates, torrents etc are fine now.

@yougotmehere where are you located? are you still facing slow speeds and maybe you can also try sending an email with similar message to CC address.
 
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Another update:

So a few days ago, I again noticed slow speeds in the morning to various sites and speed tests. Casually sent a direct message on twitter to @ Airtel_Presence just to ask if any issue going on at their end. They quickly replied back and also called me to ask about the issue then they created a service ticket as well. Issue was resolved in a few hours but still facing slowness on some locations/speed tests like on fast.com. Got multiple call back followups to ask about the issue I was facing.

Since yesterday now it appears everything is back to as before (when I first signed up for the connection) - even fast.com is showing over 20 mbps speeds now, other places like Google fiber speed test showing 30+ mbps and downloading (mostly Linux packages) and torrents also going at "full speed" of 30-40 mbps.

The twitter team again messaged be asking for feedback (and called me too) to post it publicly - so I tweeted a "thank you" note and also posting here :-)

Again, fingers-crossed, hope this issue is resolved and stays this way.
 
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