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]

@Lolita_Magnum Yes & TBH they've messed up many things since Mumbai launch. I've never faced any issue since 2019 but now ping has increased by 2-3 ms as well as I've seen sometimes apps like Zomato and some international websites load slower or sometimes doesn't even load. I've been seeing Mumbai as my IP location & some weird stuff. They've changed their main backbone from Delhi to Mumbai & I think in few months we'll definately see good speeds whether that be international speeds or other speeds like torrenting and all. I know for you and many other nerds out there this is causing problems and hope they fix it. For me till now I haven't faced any issue (maybe because I rarely use torrents or have any work that requires port forwarding or needing static IP or any of that stuff). But your & everyone else's points are also correct why can't they fix stuff. Let's watch...

 

[HC1337]

The thing is there are not many home connections being specifically catered towards prosumers (not that I am aware of anything yet), every connection is made to just work for the end user who is a every day Joe who would wanna binge on Netflix after a day of work or spend time on YT or social media before bed.

 

[Lolita_Magnum]

Just had a talk with the chief technical team of Excitel Mumbai, they presume that they are not aware of my issues even though the the existence of numerous tickets in the app, after a lot of tussle they finally agreed something is wring with their customer support backend which is causing every Mumbai customer to be diverted to Delhi.
Tomorrow a technical staff will come by to analyse what's the issue.
To be honest this is just stupid at this point.

When I told my father we'll be disconnecting excitel too, he was very furious and ragged the excitel team to and fro on the phone. This my 4th failure of an ISP just this year.

Even though I have airtel, it seems I treat it like an adopted child.
I'll miss you I-ON.

 

[havoc]

@Lolita_Magnum so basically what they're going to analyse tomorrow? What do you expect them to fix? Also are you going to cancel the connection? Also this is very weird like all India traffic is being diverted to Mumbai while it was previously Delhi & funny enough Mumbai customers are getting diverted to Delhi ... Man that investment excitel got has screwed them ...

 

[Aakash Malhotra]

nothing is gonna get fixed. Torrent speeds outside peered won't work. Port Forwarding won't work. DNS highjacking won't stop etc etc. Just disconnect the connection and move on. Otherwise it will only be a waste of time, energy and effort for yourself.

Excitel is meant for your average youtube-google-netflix joe. It is not mean't for people who are tech savvy and want a quality internet connection.

Stick to airtel or whatever isp that was working for you.

 

[a.c]

This ^^.
While excitel is cheap, the only way it can solve some of the above problems is to invest the saved money into a VPN provider (not the most ideal solution I agree, but it is what it is for excitel).

 

[Lolita_Magnum]

@havoc I have already asked for disconnection. They are like, sir since you anyway have more than 2 months available on the plan, just check this time. If it doesn't work then we will disconnect it. At this point, I feel like they will not even refund the deposit money.

It also seems like the person coming does not work at excitel.

@Aakash Malhotra yes, that's the plan but my dad was insisting that just check once and get done with it.

 

[havoc]

Man I don't know what they're gonna do... Probably just some ping tests & all that's it. Once the connection is disconnected They'll need 30 days for refund.

 

[Lolita_Magnum]

So, a technical engineer came by. Surprisingly he understood the issue clearly and even he realized this issue can only be solved by talking to NOC.
Unfortunately, the great benevolence of Excitel does not allow directly contacting NOC but instead needs to raise a ticket in a tiered system, ie L1, L2, etc. And so the engineer had to do the same, we wasted our time explaining the issue to each tiered CC but all they do is do a ping test or a local SPEEDTEST.net!! Finally, the L1 customer support was so illiterate that he was not even able to start task manager. His point was since I am getting good speeds on speedtest.net then everything else is my fault. I said do a simple Linux ISO download and see the speed. He does it and sees a speed of 5MB/s.

Would you like to know what he did then?
He downloaded the same SHIT 5 times, now as they are parallelly downloading, they are able to achieve full speeds hence solution is solved according to him. My all other issues like speed degradation and others were clearly ignored.

Finally after becoming depressed with the BS of sitting around and being a literal donkey for the last 4 hours. I just gave up, I told the engineer just leave it. My whole day was ruined and so was yours. Let's just forget it.

At this point, even the engineer was in tears seeing the condition of the company, and then we dropped everything we talked for a bit about what I will do next and he left.

Final verdict: literal fckk! this!! I'm done. Now only thing remaining is for them to take away the ONU.

 

[Aakash Malhotra]

told you it will be a waste of your time, energy and effort.