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- Sep 18, 2009
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I dumped Reliance Broadband about an year ago, and they sent me a letter:
How sweet, an email address I can reply to. So I did:
How sweet, an email address I can reply to. So I did:
Hi,
This is in response to your recent marketing letter urging me to join back into the "million strong Reliance Broadband family", close to an year after I left it, and that you have a "special scheme worked out specially for me".
Let me begin by saying that thank you for that communication, but no thank you. There were a number of reasons I unsubscribed from Reliance Broadband:
1. Poor Infrastructure: If I remember correctly, I was subscribed to a 400 kbps unlimited plan, which I gradually upgraded to 600 kbps, and eventually 1 mbps, paying through my nose at Rs. 1300 a month. I live in the heart of Hyderabad city, and I can claim that my electricity connection was more consistent than Reliance Broadband (I had fewer power-outages than connection-outages). I needed the connection to work at any time of the day I wanted it to, and Reliance Broadband certainly didn't cater to that very basic requirement
2. Actual Speeds Vastly Differed from Advertised Speeds: 1 megabit equals 128 kilobytes, not 100 kilobytes. Refer to ISO specifications for conversion, Google it, if you don't know what ISO is. My 1 megabit per second connection never (not even in short bursts) crossed 100 kilobytes per second, I had taken that issue up, written to virtually everyone in Reliance, and even wrote to TRAI and various consumer fora, that didn't fix the issue. I fully understood that there's something called protocol overhead, and that eats into the available bandwidth, but that didn't explain how my bandwidth was capped at 100 KB/s, notwithstanding the fact that protocol overhead cannot eat into 25% of the bandwidth.
3. Bureaucracy: Dealing with the convoluted and slow Reliance Customer support is an experience I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy.
4. Reliance Got pwned by a Local Company (now this is an important observation, keep up with me here): Do you remember the days when fancy novelty stuff wasn't accessible to Indian consumers, and that they would rely on their relatives settled in the developed world to bring them things? And how you'd have to pay through your nose to clear that stuff through the Customs, and you'd end up paying 200% for the commodity that a person in the developed world would? Internet service to Hyderabadis was a similar case, when we would rely on you Mumbai-based telecom companies like Reliance, Tata, or state-run VSNL/BSNL. Internet as a service was appearing to be too bad a deal for Hyderabad's residents. We were paying 1500 Rupees (33.5 USD) for 1 Mbps (in reality, 100 KB/s, or 800 kbps) unlimited, when people in China are paying the equivalent of 20 USD for 10 Mbps unlimited.
Then came the messiah of Internet service providers, Beam Telecom. This local company offered me 4 megabits per second unlimited plan for 1500 Rupees a month. It was a no brainer to dump Reliance for this company. It's not just the deals, but the structure of the company that attracted me. Much like TV cable operators, this company has adopted a truly Indianised approach to its customers. There is a customer-care call center, but the company gives you the cellphone number of the technician in-charge of your locality, and encourages you to get directly in touch with the men on the ground to get something fixed. They don't keep records of what they fix, and so they're not under this fear of "poor track record" observation by higher company management. With Reliance, the hierarchy reigns supreme, the franchisees on the ground hate it when you lodge a complaint with the management (call-center), provide inferior service.
This May, Beam Telecom gave me an offer I could not refuse, a shocking offer: 20 megabits per second, unlimited downloads, at 2500 Rupees a month (including all taxes). Finally, finally, I saw some parity being established between the Indian internet service consumer, and his counterpart from China, or even the west. After subscribing to that plan, I wrote a personal Thank You letter to the management of Beam, for what I saw as a watershed for residents of Hyderabad.
Do you have a better offer to make? No? Then tell your Anil Ambani to get the hell out of the Broadband business. He is robbing people blind, and don't he dare needle Beam Telecom with anti-competition charges. At an age when Americans are paying $25 a month for speeds like 80 Mbps unlimited, British doing 50 Mb/s at around the same price, and when the Chinese get 30 Mbps for $50 a month, Indians DESERVE 20 Mbps unlimited for $50 a month, and Beam Telecom's service is the closest it gets to that. If your infrastructure can't handle it, lobby around in New Delhi to make the government expand the internet backbone, lay new undersea cables to Europe, East Asia, and Australia, expand the undersea network bandwidth alloted to India by 10 times. Companies as big as Reliance and Tata can make Delhi to do that, and you owe the Indian consumer at least that much.
Don't call me offering crappy 2 Mbps unlimited for 1500 Rupees a month. I'll just laugh hysterically and hang up.
Regards,
<<my name, address>>
