I purchased a MTS Ultra Wi-Fi dongle on 11th June 2014, my connection was activated after 7 days on 18th June. Activation wasn’t easy. I had to repeatedly request the retailer and ultimately had to lodge a complaint with the Department of Telecom or DoT via pgportal.gov.in website. So, that was the starting of relationship with MTS Internet services.
I was surprised to see that the advertised 9.8 Mbps 3G plus was giving me less than 2G speeds. Dongle was receiving very low signal strenths, about 2 bars. In terms of kilobytes per second, I was getting 8 to 25 KB/sec speeds all through day time. At nights, after 12 am, the speeds went up to 50 - 50 KB/sec.
After another complaint lodged with DoT, two persons came from MTS and installed a Yagi antenna on my rooftop. This increased the signal strength to 4 bars. However, they faced enormous hardship to achieve a 2 Mbps speed, that too, after trying and adjusting the antenna over one & half hour. Most of the time, the upload speeds were showing higher than the download speeds.
About 1 to 2 Mbps in day time and 1.5 to 2.5 Mbps in night time(megabits per second) worked for about a week. Then the speeds came down. About 512 Kbps to 1 Mbps average over the 24 hours. This is unthinkable, with a Yagi antenna installed on rooftop.
My wireless Ultra Wi-Fi dongle has literally become a wireline device, a wire from the rooftop antenna needs to be kept connected a holder which holds the dongle. If I take it off and want to use it as wireless dongle device, the speeds would go back to what it was before complaints.
Over 6 months use, my best results, with speedtest.net are 3.04 Mbps(at 2:58 am) download, and 1.84 Mbps upload.
Now about the recharge issues for prepaid users. MTS does not offer recharge facility directly from their website; one has to recharge via third party service of rechargeitnow.com
There is serious discrepancy about*balance carry forward* feature offered by MTS in some recharge denominations. Whether you recharge well before or right on the expiry date, =no unused balance is carried forward=. If you analyze the attached screenshot, you’ll see some amazing balance fluctuations, but no balance carried forward lastly.
The only positive thing I saw is the connection seems to be stable. No major issues of disconnection and reconnections.
Overall verdict:
Not a user-friendly ISP, performance level far down below advertised stuff, customer care response too late & too slow, and recharge features are misleading. I shall never recommend a product which results into customer suffering.