Its been a long hiatus since I was busy moving house from Delhi to Bangalore.
After my return, the first product I would like to review is the Airtel Home Office Internet Package. As mentioned earlier, I had moved house from Delhi, hence I had no net connection at home and it would take some time since I would need to apply for a landline and Broadband, even though I have an option of Wimax, at present, this service is not a very good one (Offered by Reliance) what with disconnect and download problems, not to mention that it functions very rarely!
So here I was without any internet connection hence I decided to use the Home-Office internet package from Airtel. Incidentally these packs are offered with the prepaid connection alone (Dont Ask me why!?)
Heres the Deal, They have 2 versions of this package, the daily pack and the Weekly pack.
The Daily pack is for a person who would need limited internet connectivity for a day alone and the procedure to activate the pack is as simple as ABC!
All you have to do is send an SMS with the keyword "MO" to 6123 and Rs.20 is deducted from your Balance instantly, once done, you will recieve a confirmation SMS saying that the pack is active, followed by the settings message, if you do not get the settings message, you need to send keyword "All" to 222 and you will recieve the settings.
This pack expires at 10AM in the morning, so the sooner you take it after 10AM the better, I have no idea why this is the case as I feel that the provider needs to provide 24 Hrs service instead of disconnecting you prematurely at 10AM in the morning (Well, I have used this connection till around 10:30AM myself!)
Coming to the speeds, I managed a decent download speed of around 22 KBps at its highest, the lowest download speed I have ever had with the connection was 0.5 KBps, mainly owing to the fact that it was a Sunday, and most people use this service on the weekends, so dont expect great speed on the weekends, weekdays are the ones to use this connection as the speeds are higher as the network congestion would be lower.
Using this connection on my Desktop PC, I have managed a consistent speed of 480Kbps and a download speed of 12KBps at the max.
You can setup this connection on the PC simply by adding a new connection and putting in the access number as 99*1# and selecting to use your phone as a Modem, either through Bluetooth or Data cable (Tip: Bluetooth is not very reliable, not to mention that it drains the battery, so if you do have a USB cable, use that instead).
Customer Service as usual sucks, the Customer care Reps do not know what they are talking about, they simply follow a blind script, imagine this, my system shows that it is connected at 115Kbps and I am able to browse the web using the handset, the customer care guy says that the settings are incorrect!!
For gods sake, how did I connect using the handset in that case?
I figured out that I needed a winsock reset and that actually fixed the issue, no thanks to the 10 phone calls I made to customer care who kept pushing me around asking me to do this and that with no firm resolution in sight.
Coming to the weekly pack, all that is different is the SMS number, the SMS number is this case is 6125, hence you need to send the keyword "MO" to 6125, please ensure you have adequate balance as Rs.20 will be deducted from your account daily!Again this pack expires on the 7th day at 10AM.
On a lighter note, maybe I could teach those customer care guys something about their product!
Also if anybody has issues with connecting, I would be happy to help with my experience setting up the product , please do drop me a line if you need help!
To Summarize, I would definitely recommend this product to all and sundry as it offers a pretty inexpensive connection to the net without the hassle of a Landline and additional charges for the internet connection.(Did I forget to mention unlimited downloads!!)
Recommended for small time internet users who are not too picky about the speed they get.
Not Recommended for power internet users as you WILL notice the speed deficiency of the connection at all times.