Excitel Fiber Broadband Experience in Delhi NCR

[unnecessary]

As you're from Delhi have you tried ACT's 1 Gig plan? It's unbelievable how you guys can get it for 2k. In my city they do max 300 Mbps that too for nearly 1.5k. I want to try some new ISP's but none seem to fulfil my desires. You Delhi people are lucky and have so many options in pricing as well.

 

[Jonas]

Well, I am on a 400 Mbps plan. My requirements would easily be met with a 300 Mbps plan as well.

The only benefit I can see is posting a 1 Gbps Speed Test and annoying the forum members.

 

[Skeeter]

that's quite of a speed boost given by excitel to you. or could it be, you don't know how many megabits are there in 1Gbps.

 

[Jonas]

Yeah, quite possible. I don’t get caught up in all that. As long as my requirements are met, I am all set. I actually enjoy days when I am not using the internet at all, it doesn’t cause me distress.

 

[Anurag Bhatia]

Hello folks

Review:

So I got them to see if I can have that as one of the two providers at home replacing Siti. My other provider is pretty good and don't have a reason to replace them for now. I am using these in Rohtak (not NCR in common language, though NCR on paper I think). The difference in Excitel setup in Delhi NCR (or Mumbai or Chennai) Vs a city like Rohtak is that they have to rely on NLD provider. A provider cannot easily get reliable dark fibre for such long distance (70km from Delhi).

I am on 400Mbps plan (for next three months) and I see 400Mbps for most part when checked via speedtest.net or fast.com but that isn't the complete picture. I have put automated tests via Intel NUC at home which is forcefully routed behind Excitel (via policy based routing) and I ran 4 speedtest to 2 different servers. And I also ran 4 iper3 checks to 2 of my servers in Mumbai. Both of these are done using Prometheus exporters and metrics are graphed using Grafana.


Speedtest.net results:

(Overall fine. You will notice some dips but that's OK)



iperf3 results:

I have a feeling that speedtest.net results are manipulated here. Even when checking at extreme off-peak time 4am on Sunday, I do not see more than
50Mbps on 10 parallel transfers to AWS. (rclone output here: https://f003.backblazeb2.com/file/abcdc-web-public/public-share/2023/12/aws-transfer.png). For regular peered content it's mostly fine. I see full 400Mbps in those cases.


Latency wise this seems to be one of the best options for now:

anurag@host01 ~> ping -c 5 www.google.co.in
PING www.google.co.in (142.250.193.35) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from del11s15-in-f3.1e100.net (142.250.193.35): icmp_seq=1 ttl=117 time=3.45 ms
64 bytes from del11s15-in-f3.1e100.net (142.250.193.35): icmp_seq=2 ttl=117 time=3.68 ms
64 bytes from del11s15-in-f3.1e100.net (142.250.193.35): icmp_seq=3 ttl=117 time=3.08 ms
64 bytes from del11s15-in-f3.1e100.net (142.250.193.35): icmp_seq=4 ttl=117 time=3.11 ms
64 bytes from del11s15-in-f3.1e100.net (142.250.193.35): icmp_seq=5 ttl=117 time=3.02 ms

--- www.google.co.in ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4005ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 3.020/3.270/3.684/0.256 ms
anurag@host01 ~>

I get 3ms to most of content hosted in Delhi reachable via PNI and Extreme IX peerings of Excitel. Tata Comm (AS4755) network is within 3-4ms and Airtel/Jio in NCR are within 4-5ms. Latency to Mumbai is 22ms.

 

[Anurag Bhatia]

I would add to my previous post - I think it's overall decent value for money on lower plans for regular usage. But going for higher plan and assuming you will be able to actually push that many bits even with multiple threads won't just happen. Regular internet usage is lately Google/YT, Facebook, Netflix, Hotstar via Akamai etc and they are fine covering that part. Remaining internet (less than 20% of their traffic) going outside of NCR via TCL transit is something where performance suffers greatly.

 

[Skeeter]

Its been more than 25 hours now, its down. Went to LCO's office where he was watching some TV serial.
I am saying this again, please do not get Excitel if you have other options.

 

[Anurag Bhatia]

Well as always with LCO/franchise model - the quality varies. What you are feeling might be true for your LCO. I don't have any comments for my Excitel LCO as connection has been provisioned for less than a week but I was under LCO model on Siti broadband my Siti LCO was one of the best. I tried delaying switch just because of him.

Also, besides LCO quality keep in mind majority of overhead cabling is illegal and LCOs/ISPs are under constant threat from both municipal and electric grid (whose poles they use). So uptime/fibre cuts depend a lot over how aggressive Municipal/grid operator is or is not in those areas.

 

[Skeeter]

Right. But the work of LCO is to fix fiber cut ASAP, they take a lot of time doing that. They are assigned a simple task to join the fibers back, yet they fail to do so.
I have Airtel Fiber, and I had only one fiber cut and that was resolved without putting any effort.

 

[Anurag Bhatia]

Yes, it's fair to expect that (and possibly your LCO might be bad) but we don't know the whole story.

May be LCO is threatened in some way, may be he's not allowed to access fiber while some work is going on. I have seen smaller ISPs in my city avoid grid folks when they work. When grid folks pull new cables, install new transformer etc it's often a 1-2 day task and ISP/LCO folks would just roam around without trying to act. That way there remains a vague idea on whose cables are hanging around. That's just one guess out of dozen of possible things.

About Airtel - in my city they launched via LCO but have their own poles and permission from municipal (similar to Jio). So they have less issue with Municipal and grid operator. That might be the case in your area as well. If Airtel works well for you can explore going back to them.