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Monday, May 28, 2012

Speed, that I was supposed to carry

Updated at 19.34 hours IST on 7 June 2012. Curious case indeed.
"Speed You Can Carry". Well, that's the tagline for TATA photon+. According to the parent company, photon+, with its 3.1 Mbps connectivity, is supposed to be some steps ahead of its predecessor, the TATA photon wireless broadband. The company also claims that Tata Photon Plus is a High Speed Internet Access Service (HSIA) that should provide downlink speed of up to 3.1 Mbps and uplink of up to 1.8 Mbps. As always, there is a whole lot of difference between claims and reality.
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It was the morning of 25th May 2012, Saturday, when the trouble started. Repeatedly, the dialer refused to get itself connected to the network, the reason being the remote computer's unresponsiveness. After a few tries, when I could finally get connected to the Internet, the connection started to crawl. Firstly, not even the home page of any web based e-mail service would open, and when it did, it was simply impossible to log in. In fact, it reminded me of the dial-up days, when we used to get disconnected frequently and while trying to reconnect error messages like, "Remote computer did not respond" were pretty common. But those were the pre-broadband days!
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After this connection-disconnection-crawling-not responding game  continued for an hours or so, I called up the toll free, dedicated customer care number for Tata Photon, 1800 266 121. An assuring & calm lady's voice from the IVR told me, "Please call 1515 from your Tata DoCoMo connection for any problems related to Photon" and it hang up without saying anything further. I called again. Same result. As soon as the call was 16 seconds old, the line automatically got disconnected. I tried 5-6 more times from 2 different numbers. Alas, the end result remained the same. The Einstein did not tell me how I was supposed to make a voice call from the Photon+ connection!
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At last, I could get hold of a customer care executive at 6.30 pm, approximately 6 hours after my first try to contact them. All he said was, "Extremely sorry for the inconvenience sir. There are some connectivity issues in south Kolkata, which should be sorted out within the next 2 hours. If you face a problem even after 8.30 pm, then please call us and lodge a complaint." Rocket science! Isn't it?
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It was 9.30 pm and still there were no solution. So, I called up again. After the usual niceties, I was told to clear my %temp% folder, which I duly did. As nothing happened, I called up again at around 10 pm. The executive told me that their software was not running and that I should call back after 30 mins. 11 pm and the same story about some congestion in the network and upgradation work of the system was shared and I was told to wait another 2 hours. Patiently I waited and called again at 1.30 am of 26th May. The gentleman on the other side listened to every derail and uttered the word "sorry" some 10 times. He then told me that a ticket had been raised and the technical team would get in touch with me pretty soon.
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Satisfied, I went to sleep.
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A princely 11 kbps downlink was available.
I woke up on Sunday, 26 May 2012 and still the problem did not show any signs of going away. So, I repeated the entire procedure again. Twice, in fact, and with the same result. Lastly, at 10.05 pm, I told the exec that I was sick and tired of this 2 hours business. Then, he said that may be it would take 5-6 hours more to be rectified and that I could safely take this for granted that the normal connectivity would not be restored before Monday morning. I just thanked him and with whatever available speed, sent a complaint to their helpdesk.
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In the mean time, I had managed to run a speed test and it showed that I was getting a princely 11 kbps of bandwidth as against a claimed speed of 3.1 Mbps! On top of that, just think that before you buy their product, they promise that if you fill up a form, they will call you back in 10 minutes. After you have bought and got caught in their net, its a different story altogether. Reminds me of those jokes on demo and the real versions of hell! Unfortunately, can't even laugh in this case.
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To top it, the collection guys will invariably call you some 7-10 days before the due date for payment, to remind you the amount due and the last date for payment. And, they will repeat this bloody exercise every alternate day till the due date, irrespective of payment being already made. Just imagine, you are in a meeting with a client, someone calls you and tells that she is from Tata Teleservices and would just like to remind you and blah blah blah! Highly irritating.
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Even, my Reliance Netconnect Broadband+ was far better! True, they don't have coverage in the North Eastern states, but in all other places, they actually provided broadband like connectivity.
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In this case, after all these, finally I have been allotted a complaint reference number and Tata Teleservices had promised that someone would get in touch with me by 1.46 today, i.e. 27th May. Let's see what happens next and what more surprises they have in store for me.
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Have you faced similar problems with your service provider? Please feel free to share your story as a comment in this space.

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Update as on 29 May 2012, 14:10 hrs IST
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Till now, I have not received any communication from the service provider's side. Even the complaint ticket no. that was raised, remains unsolved.
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Probably, they are working as per their new tagline, "Get Speed, Get Time". Unfortunately, their and my standard time intervals do not seem to be converging anywhere!
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Update as on 7 June 2012, 19:34 hrs IST
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A lady had ultimately called on 31st May, in the afternoon and told me that the problem has been resolved. To that effect, I also received a mail, which essentially stated, "We trust your complaint, docket no: 511091, has been addressed to your complete satisfaction." Complete satisfaction? What's that? How am I supposed to get that?
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And the problem is back haunting me everyday, for the last 3-4 days. In fact, as I write this, I have had to twice reconnect in the last 3 hours. What a mess of the quality of service, these Tata Tele guys have created! Oh! Before I forget, 3 reminders have been sent intimating the bill payment due date! They have given stiff competition to the leech like collection departments of Indian financial companies.

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