Lets start with some facts:
First of all, if you are reading this review then most of you spend an average of atleast 2-3 hours on the internet everyday! Regardless of what you do ;-) you do expect your internet connection to be working at that time and you should be comfortable enough to browse/download anything without worrying about the datatransfer.
Yes I do agree that your connection speed should be within the limits of the plan you decide to purchase but who on earth said that you need to pay for the connection speed as well as the datatransfer !!! Why would someone pay for a car and then be charged by the distance they travel everyday ?
So on an average, you pay around Rs 1.5/- per MB of data (to and fro) that means that a normal browsing hour would cost you somewhere around Rs. 5-12/-. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this like paying a cybercafe ? When this so called looting scheme was introduced by Iqara, I personally was royally pissed off! I had some faith in Indian business ethics and was very confident that they will be gone in a few months. But to my utmost surprise, I found that almost all the new Broadband ventures were coming up with such schemes. While other countries are boasting on going from Mbps to Gbps links - we are going from 100 MB to 1000MB plans! Its like all ISPs made a closed room conference and said ’’Hey, all Indians surf for music and p0rn, so lets cash in for a few years’’.
Here’s another fact for you: Iqara is a venture of British Gas which runs on a so called international standards. What does that mean...? It means that anybody in Iqara above the post of Manager gets a pay more than Rs. 60, 000 to Rs. 200, 00 per month and AVP/VP salaries go upto Rs. 3-5 lacs per month ! I’m not kidding I know guys working there and they are happy like pig in sh1t ! But coming back to practicality, the management is worst then a Civil Hospital in the remotest part of India. Nobody has the power do make decisions unless they are given orders. Where do these orders come from ? Nobody knows... but every morning when they login to their workstation, they have a list of TODO: things which are to be followed and reported to - blindly -
I clearly remember a year back when I had tried to lodge my complain to their tech support (on my 20th attempt or so).. the lady on the other end put my phone on hold and was talking about her colleague’s dress. After about 5 mins of hearing her gujju talks that she came back on the phone and again asked me what my problem was. This continued for 2 more days when I really started to get pissed off. I wrote a nice description about my experience, gave new words to their competency levels and faxed it to their British office (they had these details on their website). I made sure that my fax was recieved during their working hours, and to my surprise I got calls from 4 different Senior Managers and the AVP. My issue was resolved within 3 hours of my fax ! hehehe .... but they did remove the contact details of their parent company from their website.
So my friends, the bottom line is DO NOT go for IQARA unless you are going to use it as a backup connection or this is the only ISP in your city.