TPF v/s Airtel - Long term review and comparison (Pick your poison)

[Kaiju404]

@Rhishav sure will check the Asus routers today

 

[_rajat]

Something strange I notice with my TPF connection.
I use google DNS for both IPv4 and IPv6. Changed it to CF and my god, it was a disaster. Video stuttering on YT, sluggish browsing and packets dropping on MST.
Changed it back to google and everything fixed immediately.
I am unable to understand the reason behind it. Even the ISP provided DNS works fine but CF DNS has all these stupid issues. Anyone else facing this? Afterall DNS is just a resolver and shouldn't affect the connection so much, not really sure about it. Someone please explain.

Did this experiment 2 days ago and it was a disaster, changed back to google DNS within 15 mins and everything is working fine since then.
Does Tata have some beef with CF or is there some kind of DNS hijacking involved?

 

[thatayush]

No its because CF explicitly only will serve you "global" DNS entries, not ones that your ISP may have locally cached. Google does serve you local ones based on your IP. This feature is called ECS, you can search online and see a list of DNS providers that support it. CF's stance for not doing it is privacy.

 

[_rajat]

I think TPF runs fewer, heavily shared public IPs per pool or rotates/reassigns them poorly, noticed some of the Apple services like app store not working, did some digging and found CG-NAT to be the culprit.
Airtel also does CGNAT but I didn't face this issue quite often(maybe 2-3 times). Maybe Airtel shares a public IP with fewer users while TPF is aggressively putting a large number of users behind a single public IP.
I know that IPv6 exists which is a public IP but the way TPF is handling IPv4 CGNAT is not great.
Ended up taking static IP and I no longer face this problem, also noticed that pings went down by 2-3 ms on CS2 and Valorant servers.

Getting a static IP from TPF is so easy, just place order via the app and done. Airtel has such a complicated procedure where a technician is assigned who has no clue what static IP is. Been there, done that.
I can also view the static IP assigned to me from the app itself, which is great.
Why Airtel has to make everything so complicated for no reason.

 

[Kaiju404]

Another niche feature that TPF provides is their data boosters, validity is same as base pack.

 

[Chip]

@_rajat TPF has a smoother ordering and fulfillment setup than Airtel does. I got my TPF static IP in a matter of 60 seconds via email. At first I thought I needed to configure the router and after a call with the tech realised it was assigned via PPPoE. As for Airtel gosh what a stupid experience. Most of these guys dont even know what is a static IP and I had to literally tell someone at the NOC to give me the IP gateway and subnet thats all I needed. He did it and it worked. Honestly getting Airtel to hand out a static IP is a royal PITA.

 

[jehunix]

I wonder why static IPs are assigned over PPPoE still even when you pay premium for the same. PPPoE was built decades ago for old DSL billing systems, and it shows: the lower MTU (1492) and encapsulation overhead put real strain on a lot of hardware, causing fragmentation and needless slowdowns. It's time for ISPs to move on to IPoE + DHCP provisioning instead tbvh!!

Only Jio uses IPoE + DHCP rather than PPPoE iirc but Jio does lots of DPI shit and unnecessarilyily expensive. Any other ISPs who do not use PPPoE?

 

[_rajat]

Jio also has a lot of slowdowns and browsing issues
I think it's easier for TPF to assign static IP this way, saves a lot of redundancy and manual intervention. Can't really complain. Even IPv6 is assigned via PPPoE in both Airtel and TPF.
The slight overhead of 8 bytes is not that noticeable imo.

ACT fibernet did use automatic(dynamic) IP assignment without PPPoE creds, back in 2021 iirc. This was in bangalore. Not sure if they still offer it.

 

[Chip]

@jehunix yes PPPoE does have an overhead...but one thing we consumer BB users must understand is ISPs do things that minimise headaches for themselves and their tech support staff. Their processes are not optimised to make people on IBF happy. Airtel gives a direct static IP no PPPoE but then dealing with their fulfillment team is another level of stupid altogether. This is the 3rd or 4th time I have used a static IP from Airtel and it seems to be getting worse year on year not to mention the price increase from 99 to 199 now 299. WTF Airtel.

 

[jehunix]

If you are taking 299+GST for static IP - you should take efforts to give direct static IP over IPoE tbvh! Hathway is charging INR 118 for the same. I will subscribe and see how they provide ig.