Please do yourself a favor and NEVER ever take an Airtel 3g connection. My experience is related to their Bangalore service. I have been a victim of their bad connection, sub-standard services, fraudulent billing system and harassing and cheating payment extraction agents.
I took the Airtel 3g connection in May 2012 but the dongle did not work in my area Old Airport Road. It was extremely hard to get to the Airtel helpline. I made several calls to reach them and every time the response was a service engineer would get in touch with me. After 5 to 6 calls, I asked them to either fix it or cancel my connection. None of these happened. Only thing that happened was I kept getting bills. I did not pay assuming that connection is not in use at all, and my service requests are pending, so do not need to pay.
After 3 months, I started getting calls for payments from some people that said they are calling me from Airtel. These calls started coming every couple of hours and I kept explaining that I have not been able to use the connection and my requests are pending with Airtel to fix it. This was when I discovered that the helpline people never created a service request for me. These calls continued and my visit to Airtel store and calls to 121 to explain my problem didnt help at all.
Finally, on Oct 18th, an agent called my promising if I pay about 70% of the amount, rest will be waived off. He projected his name to be Akhil and also gave me his contact number. Since I was tired of the calls, I paid the 70% hoping rest will be waived off as promised by the agent. Well, that never happened. That person just disappeared. I made call to 121 again to check on this, and once again came to know that they dont know of any such person and there is no request created to waive off the amount. Once again, I paid the rest 30%, raised a service request to cancel the connection and tried to put it behind.
But, nothing helps. Last night, once again, I have received a bill, supposed to be pro-rated rental of the time before I cancelled a connection, am sure in a couple of days, another Akhil, which Airtel will know nothing of, will call me, get the money out of me and disappear.
Having lost close to 5000 rupees and several hours to visit the store, for a connection that I have never been able to use, moral of the story, never buy an Airtel product, unless you want to experience a series of frauds and frustrations.