Airtel used to be my favorite broadband provider until a couple of months back, when things went wrong with them. I was using their service for almost 3 years and I rarely faced an issue with their connection/speed/billing/customer service. Of course, FUP is pain in the ae, but you know it beforehand and there should be no complains on that regard.
What I observed, at least in my case, is for past few months airtel connection has not been reliable at all. In fact, my connection worked maybe only for a grand total of 10 hours per month, that too in a prime area in Chennai. Their customer service is good, they were (Chennai as well as Bangalore retention team) almost begging me to reconsider my decision to get the connection terminated and they would do whatever is necessary to fix the connection.
I was impressed with their commitment a couple of times. But alas, their engineers weren’t able to figure out the problem even after waiting for the whole month. They did re-wiring around my house; but it did not help at all. Finally, I had to say goodbye to them, although I feel they are still one of the best when it comes to customer support.
I would recommend it to my friend, with appropriate caution, of course.