So here’s my rather longish saga of a nightmarish experience with Reliance Wireless Broadband a.k.a. Reliance Wimax, which I used for about 2 years.
Speed
I opted for their 750 plan initially and upgraded to 1250 (1300 I think?) plan later. Their promised speed was 750 Kbps but I effectively got less than half of that. So what I got was aborted downloads, multiple refreshes and changes to my IP address and overall, an unreliable connection.
Customer Support
Their customer care folks have absolutely no clue about technology. All they can manage to say is "Yes sir, I understand sir, sorry sir. Sorry to hear that sir. I’ll help you out sir" and they NEVER help out. They have only "sorrys" but no solutions. Being a technology professional myself, I can bet anything that their customer support guys have no clue about how the Internet works, forget troubleshooting.
What’s worse is you can’t get through to them using their toll free number. So you end up dialing their only "reachable" number based in Bombay. And it was such fun dialing this number every other day and running up a neat STD bill.
Billing
This was the ONLY department that did its "job" well. Bills promptly arrived on time. And you delayed the payment even by a day, you’d get a prompt reminder call.
Disconnection Nightmare
After 2 years, I had had enough of their shoddy service and requested for a disconnection. THEN they woke up and offered me a lot of freebies but I refused to budge.
So they took my request and gave me a request number for that sometime early Feb this year. After this, couple of people called me asking me to consider but I was firm.
After I confirmed the disconnection, their guys asked me when they can collect their (dysfunctional) antenna. I told them the date. They failed to turn up. They called me again with the same enquiry. I again gave another date. Ditto: they didn’t turn up.
DESPITE this, Reliance Wimax kept sending me bills. Month after month. What’s worse--and ridiculous--was they called to "pay my outstanding!" I had to spend precious airtime on my phone to call them and try to put sense into their heads that it’s irresponsible--and unethical--to keep sending me bills for a service I had stopped using.
And today I get the cherry this cake: they send me a legal notice asking me to appear in court to pay Rs 5000! I called up the contact person in charge of dealing with this. He flatly refused having received any request for disconnection, and said I can sue them if I wanted but they’ll"take action against" me.
So I called them again and quoted the date, time, and request number of my disconnection request. Miraculously, they said, "we’ll close the case if you pay us 2 months outstanding" and began spinning something about a billing cycle, usage cycle, and bill generation, which made no sense.
My Take:
I don’t want to sound like I’m blaming only Reliance so I’ll put my side of the story. I’ve NEVER missed a payment in all 2 years I used their unreliable service. So if I indeed owe them for a month or so, I’m willing to pay.
However, charging me for a service that I haven’t used is NOT ACCEPTABLE, especially when the service is bad, customer support is worse, and the overall experience is THE WORST. Definitely NOT Rs.5000/-.
Final Analysis:
Reliance has proved time and again that it is unreliable and doesn’t care a hoot for its customers. Examples are numerous: in every field it ventures--mobile, retail, leisure, insurance, Internet--it is struck with lawsuits, and millions of complaints but it doesn’t seem to learn. Refer to hundreds of angry posts here at Mouth shut for a small sample.
It’s been proved beyond doubt that RELIANCE TAKES ITS CUSTOMERS FOR GRANTED. We have no option but to conclude that it is an unethical company.
If you do have a Reliance Wimax broadband service, PLEASE DISCONNECT IT IMMEDIATELY. Even if your speed is good, please disconnect it because the company is unethical and takes customers for granted. Values and ethics should come first, and then the speed of your broadband connection.