My Disastrous Experience with Airtel's Support

This is going to a long post than usual: Read till the end.

I have been trying to get static IP activated since last 15 days but the engineer getting assigned is not picking up calls nor responding. Today I called up their "dedicated relationship team" and after a lost of pestering, they spoke to the assigned engineer. He visited my house today at 2:30 pm.

My ONT was in bridge mode(WiFi disabled) so I asked him to first make changes in the ONT to which he was clueless. I connected a Lan cable to my windows laptop to the ONT and logged in. Now here's something to note, my personal router and ONT are placed in a cramped space in the lobby so that range is good throughout the house. Since the yellow patch cord(which is directly spliced to the white cable coming from the duct) from the white face plate was short, I asked him to take the ONT off the router stand which is mounted on the wall and place it on the table. I logged into the ONT and created a new WAN profile and asked him for the IP, subnet and gateway. As expected, internet didn't work in the first place, I asked him to check if the details are correct.

After doing basic troubleshooting, I was pretty sure that there's something wrong with the IP details because internet didn't work. He insisted on resetting the ONT once to which I was a little hesitant because it made no sense. He proceeded to hard reset it then. Now here's where the actual problem begins.
After resetting the ONT, it rolled back to a previous firmware and we simply couldn't edit any WAN profile details(all options were greyed out). I tried the inspect element thing and tried to delete the disabled="disabled" tag but it didn't work.

Then the engineer guy called up his Tech Lead and explained the issue. After a lot of unnecessary arguments, he somehow called the DSL NOC guy and asked him to configure the ONT remotely. It was almost 5 pm by this time and I was exhausted, anyways.

The IP details given by the engineer were different from the IP details given by the DSL NOC guy, not even the same IP pool. Since the router was now "locked" because of firmware degradation, I asked the engineer to inform NOC guy to set up LAN4 into bridge mode. At this point, even PPPoE link was down, basically internet completely stopped working. After an hour of troubleshooting from the NOC, internet didn't work. Then the engineer asked NOC if he should replace the ONT with another one, to which he said that there's nothing wrong with the ONT. He asked the engineer to hard reset the router once. As expected, it didn't work. It was almost 6 pm at this point and I started to lose patience because it was almost 4 hours since the engineer arrived.

The engineer was pushing on replacing the ONT to which the NOC agreed in the end because he was unable to configure the router remotely and engineer was completely clueless about these things. At this point I was just praying that internet should at least work otherwise I'd lose my mind.
Now here comes the main part of the story. When the engineer was trying to replace the ONT with a new one, he accidentally broke the fiber cable from the splice inside the white face plate. I was like WTF!!!

He called up his manager and informed about the issue. Soon after that he left saying that he will come back shortly with the splicing machine. I had no other option but to trust him. I kept waiting for 1 hour, then I tried to call him, surprise surprise, he didn't pick any of my calls. It was 8 pm at this point. I gave up because I was super exhausted.
So now my connection is down with a broken fiber cable and that stupid ONT lying on my table.

Accha khasa chalta hua internet bhi band karke chala gaya engineer.

To be honest I feel helpless and cheated at this point. Airtel's support and customer care is into shambles now. So much drama for configuring a simple static IP, which was not even that complicated in the first place.

I felt no point in complaining and talking to their lame and stupid customer care at 121. I just gave up completely because I had no energy left.

It would take another 2-3 days to fix this broken patch of cable according to my speculation based on past experiences.
There's no point in trying to escalate this issue with their nodal office or appellate because all they do is ignore my emails.

I'd look out for another ISP now and go for a disconnection after this incident. Yes it may seem a bit bone headed decision but I simply don't want to deal with all these things, I have too much going on at work and personal life. I don't care about those complimentary OTT subscriptions or vfm black services. It's not about money anymore.

This is totally unacceptable but there's nothing I can do apart from waiting for the fiber cable to get patched.

 

[trichola]

Airtel black is useful for people who wants both dth and internet connections. That is the main advantage. For Rs.100 more, you get Rs.350 worth channels and that is better than opting for seperate dth and spending more. People who don't need dth or OTTs/Xstream packs, black is not mandatory to get.

 

[Deleted member 83050]

I opted for black is because the 1799 plan (4 postpaid sim + 200 Mbps Fiber) seemed to vfm. Effective price of 2122/- after taxes. Since I was already on the 999 family postpaid plan, I thought why not add broadband to it, luckily there was a suitable black plan for my needs plus additional 1 year of Amazon Prime and Hotstar membership, which would save me 2000 rupees upfront.
I am cursing black is because if you don't like any of their services, they make it very difficult to unbundle and it feels like a trap honestly. They promise priority resolution with black but don't provide any of it, their "dedicated relationship team" is nothing but the same stupid CC, have to explain them the issue every time whenever you call, they don't have any previous context. Most of the CC people and ground staff don't accept mistakes or faults, they just keep arguing until it feels like banging head to the wall.

 

[trichola]

To be honest, your posts somewhat seem tantrums here. How do you expect such 10/10 service from crap Airtel? No bad experience in the past at all?

The difference between normal cc and dedicated relationship team I found is, the latter guys speak a little more decent. The resolution is same - we will forward to relevant team.
I didn't do it yet, but it's fairly easy to start unbundling process. There is an option for the same in the app, pay the present bill to date and submit for unbundling. They say it will be done in few hours and we can expect their team to call within few hours to convince us to cancel the request. I have not done this yet, as Airtel is better ISP for gaming/ping related things, jio is not so good and I heard many sites are blocked/doesn't work as often.

We don't have too many choices though.

Meanwhile, anytime internet goes down for me, airtel takes happily 1 day or 2, to resolve the issue.

 

[Aashish.007]

It was the same at my place when the connection was first installed, I raised a complaints and asked them to make the faceplate connection modular.

 

[imdarkray]

@rajat_ Airtel black is not good for OTTs. As @OddScout said. it is only good if you have DTH.
OTTs that come with Black are for a certain duration. for eg. the Amazon Prime you receive is for a year, whereas for individual broadband/Postpaid connections, it would work till you are on the same plan.
A dedicated customer care team, means your call will be picked up without any wait within a minute. That is the most positive thing of Black plans.

 

[Deleted member 83050]

@imdarkray bro I never said anything in the favour of OTT. It's mostly gimmick with every ISP and there are tradeoffs here and there. I don't even use DTH.
I never had any good experience with dedicated relationship team, my frustration is that they always keep arguing and come up with stupid reasons. As I mentioned above, they simply don't have any context of the previous conversation as a new person picks up the call every-time, you will have to explain them the same thing again and again, which is tiring honestly. They can simply add comments or notes to an SR so that whenever customer calls next time for an update, they have some context. It's the most basic thing to expect if they claim themselves as "dedicated" relationship team.

@OddScout bro, if you think I am making tantrums then read this thread from the start and other threads on this forum, folks have mentioned going through the same issue for even a longer period of time. If unbundling process seems to be an easy process to you, just try it once at your own risk. I've personally been through it and they make a total mess on the outstanding bill. Don't claim something to be good if you've personally not tried it.
If Airtel is working good for you and you're able to get issues resolved then good for you man.

I am paying the full amount of what I am supposed to pay to Airtel for their services, it's not like I am asking anything for free or paying less money than what is asked, of course I'd expect a decent support from them if I run into issues. There's nothing wrong in that. If Airtel is unable to provide it, it's their fault and incompetence, no matter whatever the reason is.

This forum is about sharing experiences and spreading awareness so that other members don't have to go through it .Nobody is getting any kind of monetary benefit out of this whole process.

 

---

[_Dexter]

@OddScout Where can I find this dedicated relationship team?

 

[trichola]

@_Dexter on paper.

 

[Deleted member 83050]

Bill was generated today and surprisingly they didn't add any charges for Static IP even though it was activated after I requested for disconnection. Airtel CC gets on their toes after one makes a cancellation/disconnection request

 

[Deleted member 83050]

Airtel added static IP charges this month. I simply dropped an email to net at airtel.com and they removed the charges. Also I was moved out of static IP pool and now I am in the regular dynamic IP pool.
I've also noticed that the FR team attends all the SRs in the given time slot. Although I've been getting a lot of service maintenance messages lately(almost every week now). Internet goes down for 30 mins-2 hours but this usually happens during night.