I should have read up on the reviews on Airtel 4G before buying! I have been using Airtel 4G lite for some 1 year now. It is 15 GB unlimited data plan. All seemed fine till 2 weeks ago. That is when I noticed my account logging excessive data usage though my usage habits have not changed at all! For next 10 - 12 days I did not pay much attention thinking it could be some Application on my machine that could be doing that. But things got crazy last 4 days!
Let me explain - on 1st Nov. during 9:40 PM to 11:30 PM session - I opened 12 pages - most text based - some google searches and 2 sports news pages. None had videos or big image files. I even calculated the total sizes of each of these page - 18 MB max counting all pages. Allowing for some remote call made by some other apps it cannot be more than 20 - 25 MB max within that period. Airtel showed me 450MB!
On 2nd Nov I did almost the same thing - same number of pages, and for same duration - only this time pages were from different domains and no multimedia apps opened. And duration was for 40 minutes! Guess how much data it showed - 653MB!
On 3rd at around 10:30 PM I connected the Airtel app and waited without opening a single page - this time on my laptop. After 3 - 4 minutes the App started consuming data on its own - going crazy with 7 - 8MB data in 5 secs flat - without a single page being opened! I disconnected quickly after 5 minutes.
I contacted technical support 5 times since then - only to be told that I have myself used up that data! When I asked them for log files to match with my own records they refused citing some company policy! Maybe a lawsuit will open that up! And then they sent me an email stating that everything is fine on their end!
I changed machines, Formatted another machine completely and used Airtel on that - with same results. Frustrated I called up their support again last night while the Airtel window was going crazy with data consumption - jumping 1 MB per sec without me opening a single web page or any application that would interact with the web! Predictably I got the patented reply that any data I consume is my responsibility - they can do nothing about it!
Now I have heard from a previous employ of such a company that his company used to set targets for forcing excessive data consumption on consumer accounts in the hope that the consumer will recharge early or go for a higher plan. Is there truth in it! I donot know. But from this recent experience with Airtel - I am beginning to wonder. After all I believe all of you who got airtel mobile connection has experienced the case of the’missing balance’ at one point of time or other?(that is another experience I will share some day)
If there is any Airtel representative here? I ask them to come forward with an explanation. I have all the records and logs of my activity. I ask you to produce the same from your end and explain how the numbers add up. Else YOU MUST ACCEPT that airtel has wrongly and probably DELIBERATELY used up data on my account.
I would ask everyone to spread the word about my bitter experience about their 4G plan unless they fail to come up with a convincing answer.