I stay in Bangalore... I got a reliance connection last week. First I called the number on an advertisement.. he said he will have someone call me immmidiately.. I waited 2 days.. and got the call. he said he will come for collecting the docs next day.. he called me after another 2 days saying it was raining so he could not send anyone the last 2 days and that he will send someone the next day.. sure enough, someone came home.. I gave him the docs..
The policy is that the connection will take upto 15 days... so I conservatively estimated it to be closer to a month before I could use reliance wimax.... surprise surprise... i got a call within 3 days of submitting the application... as pointed out in another review, a guy who looked like one of those cable guys, came home.. he took about 2 hours to install the connection.. and I was hooked and the connection was instantly activated as well!!!
I browsed.. googled around... just to check speed... while this guy was at home, I tried opening orkut.com... it said "page not found".. I pointed out to this person... he said something... almost mumbled about server and connection speed... I could not make out what he said .. but I got his point... he was actually saying "I dont have a clue what the heck internet means so please dont ask me"....
Now then... I called reliance cust service to ask them about the reason I could not open orkut... btw, I could not open gmail, yahoo, yahoo msngr, hotmail and my banking account on icici.. all of them return the same error "page cannot be found".. the gal who picked up the phone... was trying hard to be very professional.. (I think she just got out of one of those training sessions)... she had all the misplaced "sorry for the problems that are facing you!!!"...
Anwyays... after 10 mins she told me..."sir, since this is a new connection, your information is not on our database so I cant help you!!! call us later.. dont know when it will be updated.."... I simply hung up... cos all I asked her was "has reliance blocked orkut.com and a few other email sites?"... she never really answered it... heck she acted like she dint hear me... anyways... I let that one slide...
i called after 5 days, i.e 31st oct... cos there was no connectivity... the gal who answered the call this time apologized profusely, as if she stepped on my toe or spilled tea on my new Armani suit... after apologizing she asked me what my problem was... lol... then she asked my name 3 times in about 30 seconds... as if she expected me to forget my name... so she was making me repeat it... then call was transferred to "tech support"... after listening to the songs.. a few CDs of it... I got connected.. the person at "tech support" appeared knowledgeable... and quickly came to the my rescue.. atleast attempted to...
After a few basic ipconfig release/renew tricks dint work, she said she will have to escalate it... also that her comp was freezing or something.. so she could not give me the service request number.. is said it was ok... I got a TAT of 16 hours from her... I will check in a few hours and get back to you all if it got resolved or now... then after 5 mins she called me back with the service request number!!! awesome... I never expected her to even think of me after I hung up... hmmm need to give credit where it is due.. she was good...
Moving on the the speed itself.. I opted for 2 mbps.. the speed was never 2 mbps but it was pretty fast... I think I got closer to 1.4 mbps when I checked on a 3rd party website... I got a download speed of closer to 200 kbps!!! which was really amazing.. since I was used to download rate of about 26-30 kbps on my airtel unlimited 999 package.. which offered 256 kpbs internet speed... so if, and this is a BIG IF, the reliance connections works as it should, reliance wimax will kill all the other service providers in the country...