India Broadband

Software giants Microsoft have launched a new round of assault on the company selling pirated software in the US market.

They have filed 26 lawsuits accusing U.S. companies of selling pirated software. These lawsuits have been filed in Georgia, Illinois, Ohio, Colorado, South Carolina, New York and New Jersey.

Microsoft had also recently launched a distribution of a program, called Windows Genuine Advantage that checks whether users are running legitimate copies of Windows. They also gained when the Chinese government announced some big steps to curb piracy in the country.

Mary Jo Schrade, a Microsoft senior attorney spoke about these new lawsuits: “We’re worried about it because it does seriously affect our business, in the sense of people not paying for the research and development but reaping the benefits.”

India is the 125th happiest country in the world, a world map of happiness prepared by a British scientist claimed on Friday. Denmark is the happiest country in the world and Burundi in Africa is the most unhappy as per the map produced by Adrian White, Analytic Social Psychologist at the University of Leicester.

According to the study, happiness is found to be most closely associated with health, followed by wealth and education.

China is more happier than India with an 82nd position while Japan is placed at 90.

“We were surprised to see countries in Asia scoring so low, with China 82nd, Japan 90th and India 125th. These are countries that are thought as having a strong sense of collective identity which other researchers have associated with well-being,” a University of Leicester release said.

“It is also notable that many of the largest countries in terms of population do quite badly. With China 82nd, India 125th and Russia 167th it is interesting to note that larger populations are not associated with happy countries,” it said.

Switzerland, Austria and Iceland follows Denmark in the map of happiness. It places United States at 23, UK at 41 and France at 62.

The study is based on data from 178 countries and on the findings of over 100 different studies around the world, which questioned 80,000 people. Participants were asked questions related to happiness and satisfaction with life.

White analysed data published by UNESCO, the CIA, the WHO and the likes to create a global project of subjective well-being: the first world map of happiness.

Please ensure your billing things with Tata,

Their sales person confirms you that complaints will be resolved with in 2-3 hours but once you put up complaints they say clearly that it will be done by next 24 hours and till morning nothing can be done. What I feel they are working on Sify architecture of Cable operator and other things in-between. So be ready for disconnections.

I got installed a connection and it start from day 1

1) their people came with cable, and good point is they were not having Drill machine, Hammer, Screw Driver, and good part is they were telling me that I have to arrange for the these things if I need connection.

I must say thanks to god, they have not asked me for pole or wire to put on

2) After installation — with 2-3 breakdowns with in one month, they sent me a bill where they charged rental in advance. When I checked with customer care that this is post paid connection, they said its a company policy, and you have to pay it in advance rental. and more over if you won’t pay it in advance then you connection will be disconnected with in 3 days.

3) I got a call from their Hyderabad outbound call center, but problem is still same, he was telling me that you have signed in terms and condition and clause number is 20 — some thing, but when I checked there were only 15 clauses — again a wrong information.

If any one need names I can provide them here.

4) Its been more than 15 days when I lodged a complain where they have to show me document where I signed for advance rental, I got just one email that complain t is closed but not reply or contact.

4) Now I have applied for disconnection not sure how long they will take to refund money — I hope around 1 year

So please be alert with them. a wrong billing , and very bad customer service.

Thanks

I had booked an Internet connection from Tata Indicom on 17-feb-06 through their agent Mr Amit Kumar (9191219013)

, and he promised me that it would be installed within 1week maximum, and he took a cheque of Rs441 from me as advance, which got cleared on 21-feb.

I waited for a week when no one from Tata indicom turned up, i tried calling Mr Amit Kumar on his cell , however I was in for another surprise, as he didnt pick up the phone from my number, and first he told me that he was busy in a meeting and would call back in 10min, however he didnt, and when i tried calling him up, he would simply disconnect it or switch off his cellphone, i tried calling him atleast 250-300 times in 3days but he didnt answer the phone , then i tried calling his supervisor,and he told me that Tata indicom is yet to set up their server in my area !!and it will take 2-3days more, however i waited for another week and no one from tata indicom bothered to inform me of the status of my connection.

I even sent them a email and called their customer care but i was told that they dont have any information about it.More then 3weeks have passed and i am still waiting to hear from them, and I am not the only on, they took advance from over 50-60 houses in my area and never turned up again.The customers are just being taken for a ride and they have no regards for our money,feelings.

I booked a complaint on their no. 5500121 and waited 3days for a response but no one replied back,Strangely i was told by the customer care that though my connection was booked on 17th Feb , Tata Indicom did a feasibility study only after getting my money and found out that my area was fit for cabelling.

when i called Mr Amith on March 10 again ,after hours of calling, he finally picked up the phone and told me not to call him up again and started abusing me, and warned me of dire consequenses if i ever called him again.

So this is how TATA INDICOM DUPES CONSUMERS.They are doing great disservice to the customers.

I would like to raise this issue through your forum, and i sincerly hope that Tata Indicom wakes up and does shows some regard for consumers feelings.As a student this episode has resulted in not only wastage of my precious time, studies, and also money and caused a lot of frustration.

UPDATE : Finally the internet connection was installed on 27-march after so much delay and I was told by the person who installed it , that ’’ Sir It works fine with most websites , however it has a problem with Yahoo mail and some other websites’’ , and it turned out that yahoo, hdfc,icici,rediffmail, would take 4-5mins to open up, and calling the customer support was of no help as all they did was tell me that the internet was working fine and it was a problem with the websites !!!!, suddenly on 4-april the internet stoppped working , i called 55500121 and was surprised to find that they had a wait time of over 12min, wasted over 15 min waiting for someone to answer my phone, and when someone picked up they didnt know what to do, and said theyll arrange for someone to visit my home and get it checked , however i waited 4 days and noone turned up, on 8april i called up again and was SHOCKED TO find what i was told by TATA indicom, i was told that I had USED all my 20Hrs in just 3-4days , whereas the truth was that I had not used it for more then 5-6 hrs, when i tried to explain that , the customer service was not only rude but of NO HELP AT ALL.

The only funny part is that the Customer Care Reps Speake in PURE HINDI !!!!! which is quite hard to understand at times.

So Friends BEWARE OF TATA INDICOM and their Dubious Sales Reps as they are always trying to ROB you of Your Hardearned money.

Worst service i have ever seen. Worst customer service, they dont send bills properly disconnect line without informing and have only one office when u need to go and stand in queue to pay bill. When other providers give online payment methos these guys of the 70 still believe in queues.

I requested for a new conection it took 3 weeks to get the line up and running. Then it happened suddenly when the line got disconnected when contacted they said bill will not be send by post but will be sent by email and without informing they cut the line.

Made several queries but no reply. My system got formatted and contacted the customer support on how to install and she dosent know how to guide.

As a whole dont go for this product. This is my second bad experience in a tata product an now i have decided not to go with any of tata products.

I didn’t want to choose Tata Indicom (aka VSNL) broadband – really, I didn’t.

First on my list was BSNL; next was Airtel – from reading consumer reviews, Tata Indicom was way down on my list.

Still, BSNL doesn’t offer an unlimited data transfer package. And I couldn’t install Airtel because they apparently *need* to drive nails through your outer wall, and my landlord wasn’t cool with that. At any rate, similar catastrophes happened during my attempts to get a decent unlimited broadband connection.

Well, after a month or so, I was down to Tata Indicom on my list, and I applied; I had a connection in 5 days.

Oddly I lost signal (i.e., line signal – Tata Indicom gives you DSL) the first day. I made a call to customer care; they told me they’d resolve the problem in 24 hours, and amazingly, so they did! They sent a barely literate guy over the next morning, who told me their cable had been cut somewhere – he got me connected again in an hour. I was duly impressed by the prompt service.

To cut a long painful story short, this cycle of events started happening *EVERY SINGLE DAY*; oh wait, not every single day – sometimes, the barely literate guy doesn’t show up for a couple of days or ten. In addition, during the few hours a week that I’m actually connected, I found that transfer speeds were consistently 30% lower than advertised.

After a month of this ridiculous ’’service’’, I wanted out – I was just paying money to Tata Indicom to waste several minutes of my time every day calling customer support or talking to the barely literate technician. It’s been a month since then – I’m still trying to get them to cancel my subscription to their ’’service’’.

Meanwhile, I’ve moved on to BSNL; I prefer paying for bandwidth over paying for frustration.

Oh, and their technicians and customer service folks are terribly inept and their hilarious actions included:

1. Telling me they’re filing a complaint, but never actually doing it

2. ’’Troubleshooting’’ my lack-of-signal problems over the telephone by asking me to empty my browser cache and any number of other inane stock actions

3. Telling me my problem would be solved in 24 hours irrespective of what the problem is, whether the next two days are company holidays, and the fact that my problem never actually got resolved over the entire period of my relationship with them

My advice: don’t, for the love of god, choose Tata Indicom DSL unless they pay you at least Rs. 10,000 a month – not worth it otherwise.

This connection just sucks !!! Been using the same for the last 20 months and the service is declining day by day. Here are my observations and experiences:

1. The service is not at all reliable.

2. It will breakdown when you need it the most.

3. Call centre is just for calling – in case you want to shell-out your anger on someone.

4. They don’t have a good technical team to handle customer’s problems.

5. I am facing a problem of frequent disconnection since April 2005 and now the situation is that even their engineers have said that they can’t do anything more and they are clueless to what exactly is happening.

6. I an getting a speed of 100Kbps on a connection of 256Kbps. At the time of taking a connection I was not told that my connection is not a dedicated one but a shared one, so lot of fluctuation in the speed.

7. The TATA people don’t seem to agree with you and just force their viewpoint on you.

8. There is lot of politics going on inside the company where the lower staff is not letting the higher authorities to know about the problems.

9. I have even come to know about cases where a customer is paying for 128Kbps connection and getting 512Kbps speed.

10. I was even suggested by one of their staff members to shift to SIFY Broadband because they are not able to provide me a good service.

11. It is high time TATA realises that it’s name is not promoting confidence in the customer.

12. I have sent e-mails even to Mr. Ratan Tata , but no reply.

13 The company is full of s***ers and b***ards.

Never go for Tata Indicom broadband, never. Thats the message I want to pass across. You can sit in front of the computer and have no internet connection but still do not think about having one from Tata indicom.

The reason ? There are many. First of all , your connection would be down, for ,say 25 days in a month. And if thats not enough and you are having a prepaid connection, you will be losing money on that also as the validity period gets eroded while you are twiddling thumbs about the no-link problem.

The final reason would be their futuristic support and call-center. Its really next-gen , so you can be sure that they do not understand what you are saying and vice-versa. End result will be like this after giving them a call : You tearing your hair off and they merrily enjoying the next ….hmmmm…’bakra’.

On a deeper note, I think that its not the fault of the call-center, they do not have anyone to act on the complaints I guess.

Still, if you want to go ahead and give it a try, carry on , its your money after all!!

Its been two months since I am using Tata Indicom Broadband, and its a surprise that its working quite well after the initial hiccups. There were problems in the starting( details about which I have mentioned above ) but once you have got the connection, its really ok ! The speed continues to be a let-down as I get 12 kbps average ( my pkg is 256 kbps ) while downloading files in the peak hours.

Also, when I asked the sales executive about re-charging he said something about going to their main office and getting my pack renewed, which was completely non-sense. I have tried renewing through the broadband web-site only and its quite fast and user-friendly ( should not take more than 5 mins ).

Therefore I am improving the ratings of this product here.

So I am changing my rating of this product and making it a little better

Tata Indicom isn’t really serious about its business. I live in a costly area in a metropolitan city. My application for a net connection was rejected twice!!! They said they are unable to provide the connection. Period. No reasons or alternatives. ’If we are able to provide a connection in the future, we’ll inform you’. This attitude beats me!! They spend a lot on their campaigns. Wonder where they get the money from!!!

To apply for a connection, there are too many formalities. Like Address proof…. now why do they need an address proof??? They anyway have to come and see the house before they give the connection. And they’ll have a security deposit in case we flee!!!

I wish I could recommend this product to people out there. But Indicom never gave me a chance!!!

I have been a subscriber of Tata Indicom’s (TI) broadband service for more than a year.

Browsing on TI’s connection means bracing for a string of disconnections and lousy customer service. It is a constant test of your patience. TI’s service has the following highlights:

False Promises:

TI promised me a 512 Kbps connection, but I never get speeds above 450 kbps (90%).

Frequent Disconnections:

They installed a dedicated cables to my site, and this is the biggest drawback. The cable is flimsy and always breaks. Getting a disconnection repaired is a major headache requiring many phone calls. And disconnection is quite frequent – from many times in a day to atleast once a day. There has not been a single day so far when I could browse without the line dropping.

Customer Service (or Lack thereof)

Previously, reporting a problem used to be a straight affair. You called up the local office and tell them. They knew who you are and where you are, so the call took less than 45 sec.

But all that changed, once some penny pinching financial executive in the company discovered the synergy between the call centers Tata has and the customer service requirements of all Tata businesses. So now, you call up someone in the call center (usual waiting time 1 min, during which you have to put up with their TV ad jingle, or sometimes a message that the ’’call is being recorded for training purposes’’), then a service representative answers, you have to provide all identification like username, they’ll take about a minute to verify the address and the person in whose name the connection is registered. Then you describe the problem, and again wait as they give you troubleshooting instructions as if you are a first time caller, after you tell them that all those have been tried out, they confirm your phone number and give you a complaint registration number. The entire exercise takes about 5 mins atleast, and if you try to speed up the call by telling all information before it is asked, you risk confusing the person at the other end and end up with an even longer call. And recently, they rub it in even further by asking you if you have heard about their dial up services.

I had put down all these issues in an email to their customer service department, and did not even get an acknowledgement.

Cutting Corners

Not happy with the cost cutting with the call center routine, one fine day, two months back, I received a sweet note (along with the bill) from the the head of Customer service stating that hard copy of the bills will no longer be sent, instead emails will be sent to the Tata Indicom provided email address. Apparently, they were of the belief that receiving a hard copy of the bill at their home is somehow inconvenient to the customer. The sweet note was laced with similar sarcastic observations.

Now, it would be understandable if such a letter came from the penny pincher in the finance department, but, really, is the head of customer service to be thinking about ways to cut costs? Isn’t she (yes, it’s a she) in the wrong department? And doesn’t that explain the pathetic customer service?

So who changes email address everytime the ISP is changed? And anyone who has been to the Tata email portal will tell you that it is way too flash enriched and broadband optimised. An average page has alteast two flash ads, and there is no way you can turn off their loading. The interface has flash buttons et al. And yes, Tata benefits everytime you check email at their portal since the meter is ticking. And the average email check will cost you about 500 KB in data transfer! No doubt they want to send bills to their email address only!

No one would expect this sort of street smart behaviour from a TATA organisation – Reliance, ICICI etc maybe, but never a TATA. But I guess things have changed.

So why am I still a customer? Redundancy, my friend. It is the backup line, that never fails to fail.