I have been using Iqara for the past 10 months. The one time installation charge was Rs 995 which included 330MB of download. Subsequent to this I went in for 500MB plan with one year validity which was costing Rs 1146 including all taxes. I use about 8hrs internet every day and my monthly usage comes to about 600MB. This option proved to be expensive for my type of usage especially when one looks at options from BSNL and Bharti which were offering 1GB per month at R500+R100 modem rental+taxes. I checked up with Iqara and they were having simillar plan of 1GB download with one month validity with identical charges. In this case they dedicate a cable modem set to 256KBPS. In the earlier case the modem was shared with a promissed speed of 128KBPS. I have been using the 1 GB plan for the past 3 months and am quite happy with the price/performance.
I use the net connection for online stock trading and hence reliability and performance of the net are very important for me. What I like most about Iqara’s broadband connection is its reliability. In the last 10 months I have never faced any downtime or technicall difficulties. The connection speed is satisfactory most of the times though it tends to be slower during market hours ie from 10AM to 3:30PM. I frequently measure the speed using some of the standard sites like zdnet which provide tools for measuring the speed. The speed varies from 40-50KBPS to 350KBPS. Large downloads are uniformly fast most of the time giving 23Kbytes/sec to as high as 43Kbytes/sec.
I hardly needed any support from Iqara (normally I need their support only for renewals. Though Iqara provides an online renewal facility through credit cards or net banking it never worked for me. I had to do renewal every month through their support network. The renewal team is quite prompt in reminding and smoothly does the renewals and hence online renewal not working has become a minor irritant) and faced no difficulty so far in contacting customer support and never had to wait listening to music to talk to them.
Overall I would rate Iqara 4.5 on a scale of 1-5 (5 being excellent) with major positives being Reliability, cost, customer service and areas for improvement being speed of connection