My Disastrous Experience with Airtel's Support

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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.
 
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Similar case for me regarding service maintenance msgs.. Don't know why every 5-7 days there is a planned maintenance/disruption and every week there is usual disruption. Something is fishy.
 
Happened with me too today morning 6am.
Went down twice for 15 minutes and 2 hours respectively.
 
Most likely they are upgrading equipments or expanding their coverage area.
 
People from Airtel group on my tg are getting over 800Mb/s on 40Mbps plan. Most of them are from Delhi too.

 


That's strange, maybe it will eventually get fixed for everyone.
 

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