Excitel Mumbai Review

Still under update! DONT BUY THIS

Think this might be important to see first.

I'll keep this as in-depth as possible and if there is something I am missing or you would like to see, do comment below.

First Question, how are they providing service in this section?
It seems they have put the installation and cabling part to a third-party 'contractor' who has nothing to do with the ISP itself. It also seems most local ISP here use the same contractor, as I was dumbfounded to see my old I-ON fiber installation guy. He explained what is happening.

While there will be an OLT close to the general area of your connection, all main handling is done in Andheri, Mumbai.

Installation Experience?
I registered for the connection on 7 June, evening and they said they'll get it set up by the next morning. But, the installation people came in the evening at 6 PM, played around with the cable a bit, and then left saying they'll get it done tomorrow by 12 PM due to a terrace access issue on another bldg, which was such BS.
The next day, there was no word, and after following up with them, they started work at 4 PM, they spliced the cable and got all the initials done except the ONU, and then left.
By 6 o clock, another group of people came claiming they are the ones from excitel and will set up the ONU. By talking to them for a bit, it was obvious they were technically very illiterate and I just asked them to set up the basic WAN and I'll handle the rest.

So, what is it hardware-wise?

The model is - 'OP-XONT 71110AC-G' a Standard AC1200 dual 2 GIGA PORT with EXCITEL custom firmware having an additional 'www.excitel.com' SSID broadcasting, which was possible to be disabled.
There's not much to config in the device itself, hence I just made the required adjustments and moved on to testing.

Internet Overview.
It's a standard CG-NAT-based connection over PPPoE with no IPV6. 100% of the international routes are through TATA AS4755 with an avg of ~3ms to the nearest transit center.

And for domestic routes and such routes like the nearest Internet Exchange or even google.com is through excitel's internal route which has an overhead of 18ms.

There also seem to be some routes through HonestyNetSolutions, eg 9.9.9.9.

The connection at the moment seems decent enough but in long term, the real sustainability would be revealed.

Test-bench.
Testing was done on a fairly modern high-performance desktop, over a 70m long CAT6 ethernet, with Giga-Link Speeds. All background tasks and other devices are removed to give fair chance to the ISP.
I did not bother hiding the IP addresses, because it does not matter in this case.

Speedtest...Speedtest.....SPEEDTESTS!!
You be the judge. Multi-Connections.
Domestic

International (Europe)

International (Tokyo)

International (US)

Single-Connections.
Domestic

International (Europe)

International (Tokyo)

International (US)

It's possible due to low customers, there is better than normal single connection performance and this will definitely depreciate with time.

Faaaaasst.com (aka. Netflix)
Netflix oca being used ->

Some Traceroutes. (Since it's all Tata-based I won't add a lot, but if there is something you would like to see do comment below.)

tracert steampipe.akamaized.net

Tracing route to a1507.dscw27.akamai.net [144.48.73.72]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 103.170.80.3
3 58 ms 36 ms 3 ms 103.170.80.1
4 16 ms * 15 ms 103.170.80.38
5 15 ms 14 ms 14 ms 144.48.73.72

Tracing route to static.88.99.202.116.clients.your-server.de [116.202.99.88]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 2 ms 2 ms 1 ms 103.170.80.3
3 3 ms 2 ms 2 ms 103.170.80.1
4 3 ms 2 ms 2 ms 121.241.7.77.mumbai-static.vsnl.net.in [121.241.7.77]
5 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms ix-ae-1-100.tcore2.mlv-mumbai.as6453.net [180.87.39.25]
6 128 ms 127 ms 127 ms if-ae-2-2.tcore1.mlv-mumbai.as6453.net [180.87.38.1]
7 123 ms 123 ms 123 ms if-ae-5-2.tcore1.wyn-marseille.as6453.net [80.231.217.29]
8 128 ms 128 ms 127 ms if-ae-2-3.tcore2.wyn-marseille.as6453.net [80.231.217.51]
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 126 ms 125 ms 126 ms if-ae-50-2.tcore2.fnm-frankfurt.as6453.net [195.219.87.214]
11 125 ms * * if-ae-4-2.tcore1.fr0-frankfurt.as6453.net [195.219.87.18]
12 127 ms 125 ms 125 ms static.88.99.202.116.clients.your-server.de [116.202.99.88]

Speed.cloudflare.com

Ultra.cc - (seedbox)
Routes through CDN77 and HE did not work!
HTTP (single-connection)

HTTP (multi-connection)

FTP (single-file) (via WinSCP)

SFTP (single-file) (via WinSCP)

Torrent Testing
didn't work, whatever I threw at it nothing worked. it just didn't download.
existing completed torrent did seed normally.
(need help with this, for further testing)
Nope, I got lucky, it's not working.
It's official. TORRENTS DON'T WORK ON EXCITEL.

Website-Blocking?
It's a hit or miss, ie the usual DPI-based blocking hence you are better off using GoodbyeDPI.
The same goes for trackers.

OONI-Probe

Steam-Downloads (Steam Cache was reset before download)
Steam puts me on DELHI servers, it also seems that most IP lookup tools think that I'm from Delhi.
I manually, reset it to Mumbai.
Game-1. (popular-game [prone to be cached])

Game-2. (rare-game)

The server is being used.

GameTesting? Let me know what game should I try and how to test it since I don't play any multi-player games.
If you'd like me to test any game client, do let me know. ie. battle.net, epic, ubisoft, etc.

Verdict:
While the speeds are there, this is not what I would call quality. Excitel has asked for a 2000INR deposit for the ONU and a trail INR 590 for the first 3 months. aka 300Mbps.
Excitel also seems to have an SLA of 1 day for a 4h+ disconnection.
All in all, it will cost me INR 942.82 pm to sustain a 300Mbps connection and 824.82 for 200Mbps.
While some might argue that paying for more months in advance will sweeten the deal, due to my previous debacle with LCO ISPs, I'm honestly a bit traumatized to do so.
Airtel costs me ~1,178.82INR with a 2% discount, allowing me to sit around INR1155. and 1090.32 for paying 6 months, which honestly isn't worth it.
I will test the waters for these 3 months and will make my final decision, which will be posted in the thread.
Any downtime, errors, or issues will also be posted here.

Thanks for reading through.

 

[havoc]

Man, they've messed up their CC by dividing zones... Previously it was all managed by New Delhi. Now who know who's doing what...

 

[Lolita_Magnum]

This is exactly why I hate it.

I have applied for cancellation of this account with Excitel, I don't want this trash lying around in my house anymore. It's not worth banging heads for the paid 500 INR for 3 months, better just to get the deposit back.

 

[HC1337]

What is it that your are transferring though? I might need to look out for that aswell if anything important.

 

[opomiyulen]

Excitel speed outside peering network is worst and same goes with torrents, u can download but upload is zero. If u have any specific use case scenario, better stay away from excitel. Its good for normal browsing, youtube and otts only, which is the use case for majority users. Once u have their connection nothing much u can do for rectifying technical issues, coz their customer care is even more worst.

 

[Lolita_Magnum]

What is it that your are transferring though? I might need to look out for that aswell if anything important.

In the image above is FTPse. But the issue is persistent for everything as @opomiyulen mentioned except peering everything is bad can't even happily download a game off steam without getting hiccups plus there's the dns poisoning and hijacking.

This is exactly why providing higher plans to customers is stupid if you got nothing to back up it for, excitel.

 

[HC1337]

So waiting for excited to expand would be foolish for me it seems. Might try BSNL after how downhill my RailWire connection is going day after day.

 

[opomiyulen]

Although I have excitel as a primary connection but i must say my local isp is at par with excitel in terms of performance as it performs well within its peering like excitel. Only drawback my local isp has is, it slows down sometimes in peak hours due to load, which is not the case with excitel peering. But their uptime is at par with excitel.

 

[havoc]

I think excitel should also provide business plans etc. With higher pricing and all those issues solved. They should allow port forwarding, static IP & everything thing else technical people need. As per the CEO they're only targeting tier 2 cities with normal use case like YouTube etc. as you guys have mentioned above...

 

[igloo]

I find hathway a lot better and stable than excitel even on docsis with low upload speed. Prices are also not bad as no monopoly here in fact it's the cheapest. Ipv4 address, low pings, same speed at all international servers.
Torrent n ports working fine, complaints via app resolves quickly.
In comparison my excitel experience on 300mbps plan was worst. Conference call got disconnected when every other internet service was working fine and was not connecting back. While on airtel it came back perfectly. That's when I felt my 40mbps Airtel is better than 300mbps eyewash excitel. You won't getter any better experience by changing plan that's why price difference is not much.

 

[Lolita_Magnum]

My guy @havoc, Mumbai is a tier 1 city.

@igloo Same, can't believe hathway was a better experience than this. Their international traffic has significantly improved even more ever since Jio took as transit.