I had a corporate account for 18 months before we switched over to CDMA (WLL). I was quite happy (for a change) with most of the service but that could have easily been because I was not paying the bill directly!
Cons
So let me give all the downsides first:
Voice mail SMS notification should have the caller’s number
Once you are more than 1-2 levels deep in the customer service voice menu, you can’t press 0 to speak with an agent directly (you have to go back up the tree to do that).
Good menu design requires all customers to be able to press 0 to speak to a person at ANY point.
Rs. 75/month just to enable nationwide roaming seems high
Rs. 95/month for voice mail is also high (both should be free for high usage customers)
Hard to get calls connected every evening (6-9pm) due to congestion
32K SIM upgrade only allows 15 SMS storage and wastes a lot of space for useless stuff. We need more SMS storage!
And I rarely ever send SMS about once a week (over 80-90% is incoming msgs).
I can’t imagine the pain for heavy users.
- I need to be able to check my billing online also
Cost
I was using it freely as a substitute for my landline and my bills were around Rs. 3-4 K/month.
After free incoming and tariff reductions recently, it dropped to about Rs. 1-2 K/month.
I only call Delhi (about 30-40 min/week) & Calcutta (about 35-45 min/month) for STD.
Total I use over 1, 000 min/month approx.
Pros
The help line automatically announces your min of usage and outstanding payment as of the prev day everytime you call in which is a good idea for all operators.
The 32K SIM is great for heavy addressbook users at Rs. 250
Good coverage in south Mumbai, Andheri, Powai and Vashi
Poor in Thane
Summary
Even though I realise I might me in the minority recommending BPL, just wanted to point out the following stats that came from a front page article of Business Standard - Weekend Edition (July 5):
BPL had the highest composite average MoU/Sub (minutes of usage/subscriber) of the 6 GSM providers (CDMA stats not available).
It was 450 min/mth before May 1 and 600 min/mth after that compared with the industry avg of 270 min & 397 min respectively.
Spice was the next highest at 295 min & 466 min respectively.
The other operators in this survey were:
Airtel, Escotel, Hutch, and Idea.
Escotel had the lowest monthly avg of all 6.
In case you were wondering why May 1, that was when free incoming came into effect which boosted total min for all operators.
Even if you just look at outgoing min only, BPL still came on top with 225 & 240 min/mth.
The avg for all 6 was 120 & 148 min.
The point of all this is that if BPL were that bad, people simply would not use it as much (unless they are committing fraud and over reporting their usage).
Disclaimer:
I’m not an employee, vendor, or direct shareholder in BPL or any of its related companies.
Just a satisfied customer!
I was using a Nokia handset which I’ll have to write a review about also since it was quite good.
That’s about all I had for now.
This is one of my shorter reviews so please post all your comments/queries and I’ll try to answer your questions.
My first review where I actually recommended something!
Maybe I’m getting soft ... ;-)