Fiber broadband in India is a cable
tv replacement for a non technical person or someone who doesn't rely on internet a lot. People want OTT bundled, every ISP and telecom operator is a follower of Jio, they started this OTT bundling with JioFiber and then Airtel copied it followed by TPF and other major ISPs. Even local ISPs in Pune and providers like excitel bundle OTTs.
My relatives, mostly boomer uncles in UP and delhi want OTT with broadband, it's a very important criteria for them. Someone in my family replaced their stable Airtel Fiber connection in lucknow with Jio Fiber just for a free set top box and faced issues with internet. This happened a few years ago when Jio started giving set top box with their fiber connection.
I have been to tier 3 cities and towns in UP and saw JioFiber being marketed as set top box+internet on bill boards stuck on electric poles.
This forum is a very small community of broadband enthusiasts and the demand outside is crazy for OTT bundles now, hence the supply. ISPs are doing bulk deals with OTTs and shoving it down our throat leaving us with no option. TRAI should step in and stop this nonsense.
TPF has been over the top expensive lately
They have been charging a slight premium since the beginning if you compare monthly plans with Airtel. Few years ago, I would have happily paid the slight premium in lieu of better service and customer support but things are kind of mixed bag now. Service quality has definitely deteriorated but the customer support is still far better than Airtel. There are a lot of downtimes and planned outages with TPF now but it's nowhere close to being unreliable.
I remember there used to be a dedicated representative of TPF for our apartment and we could call him directly in case of issues which was resolved immediately. I don't see him around anymore so my guess is that he left. TPF has been cutting corners now that their desired customer base is achieved. 60-70% of the folks are on TPF in my apartment.
TPF went down 1-2 times in last 6 months for a few hours which is great uptime for a home broadband connection. Airtel also has very less frequency of downtimes, maybe 1-2 in the whole year but the outage duration is a lot, always more than 6 hours to a day or two. My connection has been down for even 3-4 days straight with no resolution. Escalated on social media, did everything I could, as a normal consumer but there was no fix.
The biggest beef I have with Airtel is that their chatbot won't even let you raise a service ticket and you can't talk to a human unless you call their "elite" customer support. One has to have a lot of patience and time to talk to their agents. This is where TPF wins by a huge margin. I can directly talk to a REAL human via their chatbot in the app itself and it's easier to raise a ticket or register a complaint. Saves a lot of time and hassle for me.
If
Tata can sort their routing issues and MSS clamping error which I am facing, TPF is a perfect ISP which ticks all the boxes for me. Until then, Airtel is my saviour. I will try getting a static IP for a month and see if anything changes.
and 100 Mbps (exists need more push talks) range , one has to enquire separately
