I purchased a MTS Ultra Wi-Fi dongle on 11th June 2014, my connection was activated after 7 days on 18th June. Activation wasn’t easy. I had to repeatedly request the retailer and ultimately had to lodge a complaint with the Department of Telecom or DoT via pgportal.gov.in website. So, that was the starting of relationship with MTS Internet services.
I was surprised to see that the advertised 9.8 Mbps 3G plus was giving me less than 2G speeds. Dongle was receiving very low signal strenths, about 2 bars. In terms of kilobytes per second, I was getting 8 to 25 KB/sec speeds all through day time. At nights, after 12 am, the speeds went up to 50 - 50 KB/sec.
After another complaint lodged with DoT, two persons came from MTS and installed a Yagi antenna on my rooftop. This increased the signal strength to 4 bars. However, they faced enormous hardship to achieve a 2 Mbps speed, that too, after trying and adjusting the antenna over one & half hour. Most of the time, the upload speeds were showing higher than the download speeds.
About 1 to 2 Mbps in day time and 1.5 to 2.5 Mbps in night time(megabits per second) worked for about a week. Then the speeds came down. About 512 Kbps to 1 Mbps average over the 24 hours. This is unthinkable, with a Yagi antenna installed on rooftop.
My wireless Ultra Wi-Fi dongle has literally become a wireline device, a wire from the rooftop antenna needs to be kept connected a holder which holds the dongle. If I take it off and want to use it as wireless dongle device, the speeds would go back to what it was before complaints.
Over 6 months use, my best results, with speedtest.net are 3.04 Mbps(at 2:58 am) download, and 1.84 Mbps upload.
Now about the recharge issues for prepaid users. MTS does not offer recharge facility directly from their website; one has to recharge via third party service of rechargeitnow.com
There is serious discrepancy aboutbalance carry forward feature offered by MTS in some recharge denominations. Whether you recharge well before or right on the expiry date, =no unused balance is carried forward=. If you analyze the attached screenshot, you’ll see some amazing balance fluctuations, but no balance carried forward lastly.
The only positive thing I saw is the connection seems to be stable. No major issues of disconnection and reconnections.
Overall verdict:
Not a user-friendly ISP, performance level far down below advertised stuff, customer care response too late & too slow, and recharge features are misleading. I shall never recommend a product which results into customer suffering.