Guys, believe me, Airtel is one of the worst DTH provider in India. Most of us bought their product just because of the brand name, but call their customer support, you will realize how pathetic it is(2012). I was using their Mobile, Landline and Broadband services for years, but a year back I moved to different service providers mainly due to poor support. I continued using their DTH till last week but now I moved back to the local cable provider.
I had many issues with their DTH service but repeated calls to their customer care or sometimes escalating to nodal officers used to resolve my problems. But few weeks back my STB started taking up to 3 hours to start. Once started if I keep it in standby mode there was no issue watching TV channels. If there is a power failure or if I turn the power off, again it takes 2-3 hours to start! Finally I called the customer care, even before listening to my complaint she said the STB needs to be replaced and I need to pay for the STB as well as installation charges.
When I bought the connection a year back I was told that the STB and other hardware are the property of Airtel, but now after the warranty period they says its my property and its my responsibility to replace it. What I suspect is Airtel is injecting bugs in to their software and forcing us to pay for replacing the hardware, thus making extra revenue! Nice business strategy, isn’t it?
Again they are not giving any warranty to the replaced STBs as they will be replacing your STB with old ones(repaired many times), it may again fail any time, you need to again pay for that.
I don’t trust Airtel any more, they already established their brand name throughout India, now they are concentrating only on revenue generation. Guys, make sure to speak to an Airtel DTH owner before finalizing Airtel as your entertainment partner.