airtel Xstream fiber users in Odisha

[Halter]

So for me apparently since mine was a prepaid connection that too in a LCO served town and not directly by Airtel I know this cause the same guy provides Railtel connections here. Firstly when I asked them in the beginning when I installed the connection. I talked to their Leads to get me a Static IP connection, she was based out of Cuttack and my connection was the first one in town so the entire crew came into the house for installation. Later she told me over the call that it's not feasible in my town yet as only prepaid connections were possible that too with only speeds till 300megabits blah blah yada yada no Telephone. Later on, I saw Airtel Black launch in our town a couple months after. I called Airtel Support on Phone and told them to transfer my call to Airtel Black Support Team. I queried about their plans etc and then asked if getting a static IP was possible he said yes and then initiated a service request to convert my connection from prepaid to postpaid after which I started getting Dynamic Public IP and then for the next 14 days I waited till someone assigned me a Static IP from the backend. Several calls and emails to their head and leads they managed to give me a static IP after around 20 days of waiting since they said that the work for this is still going on and my town is still being worked upon for this Static IP service and the next day an Engineer came to visit my place around noon and checked the router etc I talked to him about the entire process how his day was and if he knew what he was doing and showed him the IP Assignments etc on the router page i.e the very next day the Engineer visited again and this time called someone in backend and after a while they assigned me a static IP and it's been working wonders since then. I've forwarded some of my applications on Port 80, 443 and other ports for my CS and Minecraft servers.

I've had the Static IP configuration for over 5 months now. I'm getting free 1 gigabit speeds all the time even during peak hours. Ping times have been very stable and reliable over the past year from Airtel there were occasional latency issues to Europe and Middle East Servers but it doesn't concern me much tbh. I mostly play CS2 and Valorant(sometimes) ping times are very nice around 40 - 50ms, although could be much nicer if they had POPS in BBSR which they do but their Broadband backend is from Kolkata NOC apparently no NOC setup for Broaband users in Odisha yet and it also seemingly holds true for Mobile users as well. However I've seen from what HC1337 mentioned earlier that some Local ISPS like SSCableNet and Wiretel have Airtel as their Upstream and they seem to be getting even less ping times to every server. Conclusion, the experience so far for me with Airtel in my town is 10/10 no issues no complains very nice experience.

 

[HC1337]

The thing is we do have a Nxtra POP here with Sify and CF peering AFAIK, but it just used for commercial connections and not for their own FTTH connections.

 

[Halter]

Hmm I wonder 5 years down the lane if they are going to change things and make POPS and IXPS and NOCs in Bhubaneswar. I think it will hugely benefit the amount of people it serves. No doubt Gamers will see most benefits in this as the ping times will go down by a huge margin. Also I read somewhere a couple months back there were propositions to setup Cable Landing Stations in Digha by Jio and one in Puri by Railtel Corporation of India now I'm not sure if they actual work is under way or it's just hot air but if it ever comes to fruition and gets utilized and shared by all the ISPs it would again bring down latencies to International servers like Singapore and other SEA locations.

Correct me if I'm wrong about any of this. That's what I've had in my mind so far it'll be Interesting to hear everyone's opinion about it here.

 

[Halter]

Apologies for bumping the thread, but I wanted to share some updates on my connection. Overall, my experience with Airtel Xstream Fibre has been positive. I enjoy the service (if not all the customer-service rigmarole) and have had only a few technical hiccups along the way.

My initial router (provided around 2022) began auto-restarting every night between about 1 AM and 3 AM. After a bit of research I suspected the TR-069 remote-management protocol was at fault. I lived with this issue for roughly a year, but since I have a static IP and run some servers, even those brief downtimes were frustrating. I eventually contacted support; after a couple of days they got back to me. It turned out Airtel was force-pushing a scheduled firmware update that the old router couldn’t handle, which caused the reboots. They replaced it with a new Wi-Fi 6 router, which has been working perfectly with no downtime since. Fingers crossed it stays smooth sailing from here on out!

Interestingly, a neighbour who recently installed Airtel Xstream Fiber had very different results. I ran ping tests on their connection and found that their setup uses an IPv4 exit node in Odisha. This gave much lower latency: roughly 20 ms to Chennai, 50–60 ms to Singapore, and 30–45 ms to Mumbai. In comparison, my connection (with a static IP and a gateway in Kolkata) is about 10–20 ms slower to those same locations.

I asked the local technician if they could switch my exit node to Odisha, and they escalated the request to higher-level support. They said they’d look into it, but so far there’s been no update. I’m not too bothered if they can’t, but it would be nice to have the option. On a related note, I noticed a slight performance boost when I set my router’s firewall to a low level (especially shot registration in-game).

 

[HC1337]

When I initially got Airtel Xstream Fiber, I was getting public dynamic IP and gateway being used was of Kolkata.

After 1st of January this year, I got switched to CGNAT and Bhubaneswar gateway.

The Ping times improved considerably as stated by @Halter , but I stopped getting +20% speed. IPv4 and IPv6 don't have separate bandwidth anymore.

The ping time improvements were noticed in both IPv4 and IPv6.

IPv6 is fully open and I use it to host servers and services.

 

[Mota Bhai]

@Halter how can I check which exit node is being used by my Airtel connection?
@HC1337 how can I check which gateway being used for my Airtel connection? I guess exit node and gateway are the same thing, right?

 

[HC1337]

I do use the two words interchangeably.

As for your question, I just speedtest my nearest Airtel servers, whichever city yields the lowest latency is usually where the gateway is located.
And in my case it used to be Kolkata before (used to get 15 - 20ms to Kolkata and 25 - 30 ms to Bhubaneswar pre 2025, It's 7- 10ms for Bhubaneswar now and 15 - 20ms for Kolkata).

You can also search up your IP range for it's location but that might or might not be correct.
From my experience IPv6 almost always had more accurate locations as compared to IPv4. (Not a set and stone thing)

 

[Halter]

@HC1337 out of interest what latency do you get to Mumbai/Chennai and Singapore servers on a good day? If you could share some AWS or other cloud provider ping times it would be nice. I'm planning to drop my static IP and go back to normal CGNAT and see if the lower ping is worth it

 

[HC1337]

On a good day, these are the following latencies that I get

Mumbai - 30ms
Chennai - 20 - 25ms
Kolkata - 13 - 15ms
Singapore - 55ms

I will share the ping times some other time but these are the rough estimates.

I have taken this connection in a small town near Rayagada.

 

[HC1337]

@Halter can you give me some IPs or websites to get the ping results from?
Would appreciate it.