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I use airtel gprs for all my net work…connecting phone to laptop with blue tooth…it is slow but it gives me mobality…but one thing i find is that on yahoo ( not on aol or msn) most of times messages are not deleivered and i can not add or delete anyone? what can i do? talk with their call centre is useless…

Ans:
I would suggest u to go as a person to Airtel office and tell ur problem and also tell them that their customer assistance was unsatisfactory.Tell them that this is the GPRS problem from their end and ask them to do the needful right away.Also tell them that it works slow.U can always ask them to rectify it as they r themselves the service providers and u being the customer u can get it done or u can reach the airtel management.Goin as a person always makes a good impression to get the things done fast.

Bharti Airtel , Indian Telecom major has crossed a subscriber base of 50 million with nearly 48 million mobile customers and 2 million landline users. The company has become the 10th biggest in the world in terms of subscribers.

Bharti group has seen a tremendous growth in past one year. As per company reports, 25 milllion users have been added in last 14 months. The company aims to achieve target of 100 million customers by the end of this decade. The company plans to add more users from rural sector in coming years. Bharti was able to achieve high growth rate as the company offered many cheap plans to help low end users to buy a mobile connection.

The management of Bharti Airtel is quite confident of better performance in coming quarters. The company plans to launch many new products and with exciting offerings, the management expects figures to rise very fast. Bharti also plans to offer direct-to-home (DTH) services and IPTV by the end of the current fiscal. Bharti has become the fastest growing telecom company in the world by achieving this target in 143 months. China Mobile, China Unicom, AT&T, Verizon and Sprint are top five telecom companies in the world ranked by their subscriber base. BSNL has a user base of 65 million and large part comes from 35 million fixed line users. BSNL has offered a tough competition to private players in recent 3 years after the government owned organization offered better services and prices for many products.

Mr. Manoj Kohli, CEO Bharti Airtel said, “Our next 50 million will largely come from rural India as our plan is to reach 5,200 census towns and over five lakh villages, covering 96 per cent of the Indian population.”

Other than DTH, Bharti plans to offers new products in broadband internet access as well. The company has even planned to enter the telecom market in Sri Lanka.

I purchased an Airtel Wireless USB Modem last week for a whooping Rs.5700. Practically, I had no other choice as I didn’t have Airtel’s DSL service in the area I live in and BSNL had a wait time of nearly 2 months. (when will the incumbent telecom service providers learn that service not provided on time is service lost). So, I bought the Airtel USB Modem and subscribed for the unlimited data plan (Rs.999 + taxes). My experience with the modem is as follows:

Configuration: The box comes with the required CD and installation of the software and the modem is a breeze. Absolutely no problems at all with the installation. It takes about 24-48 hours to get the SIM card activated, but once that is done there is no problem with the installation or modem connectivity.

One potential problem that I envisage with users having an USB based “Active Key” to connect to their VPN networks is that, they won’t be able to use both the USB ports for the modem and this leads to a significant drop in speed.

Connectivity: I have been using this modem for nearly 10 days and there hasn’t been a single instance when the modem has refused to connect or dropped the connection. So, as far as uptime and connection reliability is concerned, the modem is wonderful. Even on the move the modem operates without any issues.

Speed: Browsing seems to work reasonably well, but still far slower that what my 128Kbps DSL connection could achieve. But, so far browsing has been restricted to text sites and I haven’t even ventured into viewing videos on youtube etc. So, I don’t have much idea about how the browsing experience will be on media content.

The highest download speed I have managed so far is only 2.4KBps (19.2Kbps). I have tried using the modem at different times to check if there is significant difference in speed, but so far I haven’t been able to observe much difference. 2.4KBps is the fastest I have been able to get so far. This is as pathetic as it can get.

The wireless modem works on Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE) protocol for data transmission. By theory EDGE should be able to support upto 236.8Kbps on the 4 Receiver (Rx) timeslots. Airtel provides 4 Rx timeslots and 2 Tx timeslots and theoretically 296Kbps (236.4Kbps Rx and 59.1 Kbps Tx) can be achieved (Airtel only allows for 5 slots to be active at any time). That is nearly 44Kilobytes/sec. This is tremendous speed and if even half of this is achieved then the experience can be really good. But, what I have got so far has not even been 10% of this speed. Actual data rates will be much lesser than the rates mentioned above as these rates include the security data, CRC’s and the FEC’s transmitted. So, even assuming that only 70% of the mentioned speed is what is possible for actual data transmission, the data rates that I have got are bad.

Also, when the software is installed and the connection is established, a box will pop-up near the system tray and say “Connected at 230.4Kbps”. Don’t get happy seeing this box as it is talking about the speed from the UART to USB. The serial port is operating at the max. speed of 115baud and I think they are using 2 bits per symbol for better speeds. (Baud is different from bit rate).

All in all, I would say that it isn’t worth nearly Rs.6000. Buy this modem only if you need connectivity on the move and there is absolutely no other option. Reliance is another provider who is offering wireless data cards/modem, but I haven’t been able to find much info about their service so far. And a couple of friends who use the Reliance connection have been facing connectivity issues. So, if connectivity is the biggest driver then this modem is a worthy investment. If you wanna just browse the web then I would suggest that you look for other options.