Fortunately I got the Airtel Post Paid Plan thru a Corporate offer so it came with some benefits like STD/IST without deposits etc. However in general I feel mobile system in India is not so sophisticated. Call drops and loss of signal or communication while in call appears to be frequent to me.
Number of times I have given up the call and dialed from my landline whenever possible. This is not due lesser cost etc, but simply that landline is more stable and reliable that today’s sophisticated Digital Mobile communications services!
Interestingly their EDGE Mobile Internet connectivity was not at all good and speed only was as good as GPRS speed which hardly is 25kbps.
Most of the times the calls made to customer were getting dropped just before contacting the customer care executive and one day I realized that it was denying my connect request to customer care executive.
Reason – If you try more that 5 times within a stipulated time, you are not allowed to talk to the customer care for some specific time etc! I had to discuss the matter with senior executive by visiting the office in person. Even I had to tell them at least 10 – 15 times to stop sending the promotional SMS messages. Even though my request was acknowledged, the system kept sending such SMS.
Other thing I noticed was that the automatic de-activation of value added service thru customer care number did not work most of the times in my case. E.g. despite disabling say Roaming, it kept it enabled and I had to call up the customer care to recheck and ask for manual disable of such service. Now I have disconnected GPRS and all other value added services and just use it for the basic communication. I use landline as much as possible!
Billingwise so far in past 2 years I have never noticed any issues or errors with Airtel.