Let me rate these folks on 3-4 different areas:
Sales:
as soon as I mentioned to the friendly neighbourhood cable wallah, I recd a call from inMumbai for the cable internet (that is what they call it). its a different thing, that the signal does not actually travel through the cable, but they actually have more of an extended LAN..etc etc...anyways, the sales guy actually did land up on a Sunday to get things signed up - take the money etc. all of this happened.
Post Sales:
so the money was grabbed, and for about 10 days after that, they could not start the connection. various excuses, reasons: their modem, not working, their hub not working, their installers couldnt crimp the wire right, and a few more. so after 10 days of repair and molesting my laptop, it started. and meanwhile their technicians kept asking me to run ’winipcfg’ on a Win2K machine....doh! so now you know what kind of technicians you are dealing with.
Customer Service:
took me a huge amount of effort, headache to get the service started. which collapsed immediately because of cable problems. and it took them another week to repair all that. they have just one number for the ’internet department’ which is more often than not busy. try calling their other numbers and the cranky receptionist will either put you on perpetual hold or just hang up on you. lovely isn’t it?
their technicians if you manage to contact them struggle to set things right.
Actual product
bottomline lousy. even from my machine to their gateway, the latency sucks. very often their modem or the connection conks out - when I have to call them again, and they would reset the modem, I have to reboot etc etc. they use DHCP, but my IP always seems to remain the same...the line drops are request time outs are far too many. Always more than 15% packet loss. If they want to run a lan based thingy with more than 15% packet loss, they should just wind up operations. Also because of the fact that I have to share a measly amount of bandwidth among too many people. is it really worth it? I asked the same question, and asked for a refund of some of my money - and was curtly told to ask their headoffice/sales office...so that is that. in most cases, the dialup connection with VSNL works faster. so, I am thinking now, shd I just buy another telephone connection?