Airtel Xstream Fiber Pune Review

This thread is related to Airtel Fiber Broadband experience in Pune/PCMC. I always try to update the thread with my personal experiences.​

Airtel Black:​

I was already using their 999 postpaid family plan, so opted for their 1799 airtel black plan which had 1+3 add on sim(999 family plan) and 200Mbps fiber broadband.The total bill comes out to be 2122(inc. gst). If i calculate the individual cost of the plans - 999+gst=1179 for postpaid and another 999+gst= 1179 for 200 Mbps broadband for both airtel and tata(varies if opting for long term plan), so total cost comes out to be around 2358 per month.
Opting for airtel black 1799+gst saves me around 2358-2122=236 rupees a month, which is not a huge amount honestly.
I paid 4000 rupees as advanced rental which saved all the installation and hardware cost, and this would be adjusted in my future billing cycle. I paid for 2 months in advanced roughly which seems fair.

Booking and installation:​

Headed to the airtel store which is just 1km away from my place, KYC and payment was done under 10 mins. They said that the installation might take time as there are a lot of new colonies and apartment buildings where airtel fiber is recently live, so they have a lot of pending installations. They promised me that installation will be done in maximum of 48 hours which is also mentioned on their website Airtel FAQ.
I booked the connection on 21st june 2023 around 4:30 in the evening. The installation team contacted me the next day around 7pm and it was done by 22nd june 2023 around 8:30 pm.

Router:​

Got the Sercomm AOT - 42221SR. Sleek and modern looking router. Performs decent, good range throughout the house. It switches automatically between 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz band, which is very convenient.
Update on 20th July 2023: The ONT is sub par in terms of performance w.r.t multiple client handling and bandwidth distribution. Ended up putting this router in bridge mode and used TP-Link Archer AX10 instead.
Setting up this router in bridge mode doesn't require any assistance from airtel. I got it working by myself.

Speedtest:​

Source
Download speed on some speedtest.net servers is over 450 most of the times. I don't know what is the reason. Didn't opt for static IP or anything. Upload speed is around 240-250 as per the plan which is acceptable.


Source

Source

Network Quality Test:​

Bufferbloat:

Bufferbloat Test Result: A+

View the full results, and test your own bufferbloat

www.waveform.com

A+ most of the times. Did the test over WiFi.

NPerf:

Latency:​

Getting good latency while playing valorant. 6-9ms to mumbai server.
Connection remains stable when connected to my office VPN.



Overall i am very happy with airtel fiber connection. Browsing, surfing and streaming experience is slightly better than Tata. This is just initial impressions tho. Will update this thread in the future in case of any major update.
After one month of testing:
Definitely better than Tata Play Fiber in terms of raw performance.

Update on 11th August:​

CC support and FR time has definitely improved atleast in Wakad/Pimple Saudagar area.

Update on 27th October:​

FR team now attends SRs in the given time slot.

 

[Chip]

@rajat_ as I said before most of the problems we have are local issues. If it's a long duration major outage like the one I faced today.... you'll get a SMS update. Otherwise it's a local problem.

 

[Lolita_Magnum]

@rajat_ I know about the cost issue and have shared on the forum, since I myself work for an ISP. The difference is, it does not cater to Indian or any residential market.

 

[Deleted member 83050]

So today i had a lot of free time and went through the google reviews of airtel broadband in my area. It is full of negative reviews. People are fed up with all the crap ground staff has been doing by not fixing or attending issues on time. Most of them have been facing this issues since last 1-1.5 years. Airtel has been in my area since the beginning(dsl and v-fiber era).
Some wrote their connection was down for even 10-15 days.
I feel airtel is no longer a reliable ISP even in tier 1 cities now. It's better to have a backup or secondary ISP if one's work or business is heavily dependent on internet.
I was gonna test Airtel's reliability but i think i got my answer now. Will have to keep Tata as a secondary ISP/backup in case Airtel goes down.
Why not switch back to Tata completely? Because airtel has better internet experience overall be it browsing, ping stability to work VPN, streaming or gaming. I am not switching back to Tata as my primary connection because their infra setup is not that great in my area. Internet doesn't go down but overall experience is sub par compared to airtel in terms of internet experience.

 

[Chip]

@rajat_ if connectivity is important to you always have a backup line to fall back on.

 

[woody]

@rajat_ Would you share the pings for multiplayer games(naming them) in various region like Europe(Frankfurt), Oceania, australia .
And if possible, could you do a tracert search for 178.162.217.65 . This is the Europe server of the game Hunt Showdown which I play mostly.

 

[Deleted member 83050]

@woody sure. I usually don't play any game apart from CSGO and valorant. Can you name a few games for which you need to know the ping? I'd download them over weekend and surely test it out.

 

[Deleted member 83050]

Update:
So it turns out that the dual stack IP is actually benificial while downloading and it's not a gimmick.

Was able to hit upto 280-340 Mbps over WiFi while downloading a very popular game from steam.

I hope there isn't any sort of server caching involved here.

 

[woody]

@rajat_ The games i play are Squad and Hunt Showdown. I have the server ip for european server of Hunt Showdown. Would be great if you could post a tracert of thisip

• Frankfurt - 178.162.217.65

 

[Deleted member 83050]

@woody here you go
Hiding my IP address for obvious reasons

Tracing route to ded116-lv-lw-eu.huntshowdown.com [178.162.217.65]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     1 ms     1 ms     1 ms  192.168.1.1
  2     4 ms     3 ms     2 ms  telemedia-ap-dynamic-255.255.1xx.1xx.airtelbroadband.in [122.xx.xxx]
  3     5 ms     4 ms     3 ms  nsg-corporate-53.150.185.122.airtel.in [122.185.150.53]
  4   105 ms   101 ms   106 ms  182.79.134.112
  5   123 ms   122 ms   122 ms  po-1.bb01.ams-21.leaseweb.net [80.249.214.123]
  6   243 ms   242 ms   243 ms  31.31.34.124
  7   285 ms   285 ms   284 ms  et-51-1.agg01.fra-12.leaseweb.net [31.31.34.27]
  8   282 ms   282 ms   281 ms  31.31.34.221
  9   414 ms   306 ms   408 ms  po-1.ce02.fra-01.de.leaseweb.net [212.95.37.5]
 10   295 ms   295 ms   295 ms  ded116-lv-lw-eu.huntshowdown.com [178.162.217.65]

Trace complete.

Tracing route to ded116-lv-lw-eu.huntshowdown.com [178.162.217.65]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     1 ms     1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.1.1
  2     3 ms     2 ms     3 ms  telemedia-ap-dynamic-255.255.1xx.1xx.airtelbroadband.in [122.xx.xxx]
  3     3 ms     3 ms     5 ms  nsg-corporate-53.150.185.122.airtel.in [122.185.150.53]
  4   133 ms   140 ms   140 ms  182.79.154.145
  5   155 ms   155 ms   155 ms  po-1.bb01.ams-21.leaseweb.net [80.249.214.123]
  6   275 ms   275 ms   275 ms  31.31.34.124
  7   284 ms   286 ms   285 ms  et-51-1.agg01.fra-12.leaseweb.net [31.31.34.27]
  8   282 ms   281 ms   281 ms  31.31.34.221
  9   300 ms   300 ms   300 ms  po-1.ce02.fra-01.de.leaseweb.net [212.95.37.5]
 10   294 ms   294 ms   294 ms  ded116-lv-lw-eu.huntshowdown.com [178.162.217.65]

Trace complete.

Note: This is done over WiFi

 

[woody]

@rajat_ hmm pretty strange, the 4th hop is in mumbai or delhi [diff website shows different] and owned by bharti airtel, still it gives 140ms. mine 6th hop is same . I have the same issue. Any suggestions how to complain them?182.79.154.145