Contrary to the prevalent opinion here, my experience surprisingly has been smooth with Tata Indicom. Maybe its too early to speak(I have been with it only a month). But nevertheless, writing my opinions on it.
Location - Mumbai
Enquiries and Installation
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Lets start with the first activity.
I was shifting localities and my previous broadband provider Hathway was not serving in this locality. I looked for various options to get connected. Of all the providers the Tata Indicom were the quickest to respond. I pinged their call center . The concerned executive noted down my details and gave me approximate timelines - within 7days for the feasibilty study and 4 days for installation and activation.
I noted with a sigh these figures - at this stage I had ruled out Tata Indicom as there were other providers like Reliance and Satyam infoway who said they will get back to me in 3 working days.
But to my utter surprise the very next day an executive from Tata Indicom calls me that the feasibility study is over and you can get the internet connection. He said he will come down to my house and explain me plans and take the necessary documents if I find their plans acceptable. I said I wont be in till 10.00. He said its fine he will pop into my house at 10.00 if I did not mind. So at 10.00 he comes down to my house explains my plans, I select surf 6000, pay and he said he will get the installation done the next day and give another day for activation. I was like lets see.
Installation person( the one who lays down the cable till your PC room ) does his job next day as was told to me.
Activation part - I got a call from Tata Indicom verify the facts like th emode of payment, the scheme details etc
Once my account was established, the following day the engineer comes and does the configuration and lo and behold! I am broadbanded!
Also please note that since I took a six month prepaid plan my installation fee was waived off!
Connection, Downtime etc
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I verified the speed - the claim is upto 2 Mbps and I could easily get upto 1 - 1.5 Mbps in evening times - fair enough I would say.
And I would also say that the general speed I get is 512 Kbps and above.
Downtime - never witnessed a down time till now.
There is a minor usability issue with the dialing part. In prepaid connection you have to log into the tata indicom system and on successful log in - a session starts. So everytime you want to surf you will have to log in and keep the session window open. This I think is very clumsy.
Call center
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Never experienced a downtime or issue so cannot say much about call center. But the experiences with the call center when I was doing the enquiry were quite pleasant.
Packages
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For a casual to moderate usage and for the promised speed the plans and options available are sufficient and reasonable
But for a heavy user who indulges in GBs of download none of the plans are economical. You will have to compromise the speed or cap your download limit( but I guess this is the case with every ISP in india)
Billing Information and Integrity
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Billing information as to status of your account, how much is balance etc is available online and very convenient to check. The usage details is given per session which is very useful in tracking your usage.
I have though some issues with some aspects of the billing.
a) The maximum cap on the data transfer includes any uploads as well - some providers provide a download cap(like Hathway).
b) I suspect sometimes I have been overbilled for eg I do some mail checking and close my connection - when I see the usage details later it says I have done 17MB of data transfer which I thought was false. Though substantiation is to be done.
Though it is still early days - I would say I am very happy with the service.