Hi all
I took a TATA indicom broadband connnection sometime in May 2004 and here are by factual observations:
- A few days after installation I noticed that the usage monitor shows an excessive amount of traffic in my account. I installed a packet capture utility to monitor the traffic. I noticed that most of the traffic consists of ARP broadcast packets. In a single minute, my router received over 6000 ARP broadcast packets from other machines in the TATA network. Over 97% of these packets do not have my IP address in either the source or destination address of the TCP header. All this traffic is, however, being logged to my account and I am being charged for it.
2 I complained repeatedly to customer service representative and asked for a service engineer to visit my site. On 8-June-05, Ramkumar, a service engineer from TATA Indicom company visited my site. During his presence, I ran the packet capture utility and showed him the traffic. He concurred with me that these packets do not have my IP address in either the source or destination. He took a screen capture of the abnormal traffic and promised to take up the matter with his superiors.
During the engineer’s presence, the router was switched for about one hour and he sent email amounting to about 1 MB from my system. However, the next day, the usage monitor shows traffic of 39 MB logged to my system.
A few days after the service engineer’s visit, I received a call from the customer service who insinuated that the excess traffic was probably on account of viruses. He was completely in the dark about the visit of the service engineer and his findings.
During the third week of June, I called up customer service centre two or three and asked whether there was any resolution to my problem. Till the end of June, there appears no resolution.
I am now left with no option but to terminate the broadband connection. I am not interested in taking this service unless the following two conditions are satisfied. (A) The usage metering system is rectified so that only traffic, where the IP address of a customer is included in the packet headers, is counted as usage. (B) TATA Indicom’s customer service representatives can do something more than parrot mechanically “have a nice day” and “thank you for calling Tata Indicom”.
Regards
MAT