Airtel sucks!!!

India is the fastest growing mobile telephony market in the world!, Indian mobile call rates are the lowest in the world, Bharti has added X million of customer in on month, Reliance has added another Y million of customers in a month etc.

These are usual lines that we get to read or hear daily through different mediums of news and media. Underneath all this hype and hoopla lies the truth i.e about the quality of our telecom networks which ranges from poor to pathetic on most networks. I am really pissed of with my current service provider which is Bharti Airtel and would focus on them for now.

I got my Airtel connection around 5 months back prior to which I used a basic tata indicom phone, Though the quality of service was very poor, I always suspected it would be because of low quality handset and also the fact the CDMA quality is overall considered poorer in our country. That was the reason I moved Airtel when I bought a new handset, over the months I have realized that it wasn't the problem with my handset alone, infact the story is same for all mobile networks, following are some of the issues I face with Airtel.

Land line users not able to connect -> I am frequent traveler between Bombay and Pune that was a reason I opted for Airtel as it was one of the few which did not charge roaming charges between the two cities at that time. But to my surprise people from Bombay were never able to call me from their land line phones, the problem was not with MTNL or some single provider almost all land line phones would need many efforts at connecting to me. I am really thankful to Airtel for this though as this assures that only people who are really dying to talk to me are going to take the pain of trying a dozen times before they can reach me, but bloody hell what if someone is stuck in a life or death situation?

Call drops -> The worst thing that one would want to happen between an important conversation is a call drop and thanks to Airtel's great service I have started enjoying the suspense that a call drop brings in. I mean just imagine the amount of hard work that your brain can do guessing what the other person would have been saying just when the phone got disconnected and also the relief when an unwanted caller is pissing you off and the call drops in the middle. In fact last night itself a friend of mine was talking to his girlfriend in Europe when the call was lost, we had great fun seeing him irritated and later when his girlfriend blasted him for disconnecting her call. We would have missed out all this fun had Airtel not provided the call dropping facility.

In fact I think Bharti should officially launch a call drop facility for which users can subscribe by paying a certain amount per month. There should be an algorithm based on speech recognition software that should disconnect the call at some interesting points in the conversation and off course I don't mind being paid a royalty for this suggestion.

Number busy -> The worst thing that you would want to happen is your girlfriend calling you up to asking who were you talking to for so long? initially I would be bewildered since my phone would be idle for all the time. Now we have realized that its not the phone but the network which is always busy that causes all this trouble.

Peculiar situations-> Along with the usual troubles that people keep facing every day due to inefficient telecom networks, there has been a peculiar situation in the last few weeks that I am facing with Aritel, i.e. I don't receive sms sent from Hutch network from Bombay when I am in pune but receive the same once I reach Bombay. I know it sounds really stupid but that's how the network works.

In addition to all this there are these billing issues etc which come up every now and then. After all these issues I would have surely changed my provider but the problem is I can't do that every now and then for obvious reasons. Secondly since most of the service providers provide nearly same quality of service I don't know if it would be of any help.