Tata Photon Plus: taking customers for granted

To whomsoever it’s concerned.

Last Friday, after coming back from work as part of usual routine I decided log onto Internet do some usual surfing and check personal mails. But I was totally blocked from doing so, as my Tata Photon plus was not getting connected at all. While connecting it was throwing some vague error “Error 678: remote computer is not responding”. I thought it was some temporary interruption and decided try it again after an hour. Unfortunately the problem persisted entire night and I had to pass the time with frustration by watching boring IPL matches.

Next day in morning when I called up the customer care, I got to know that my connection has been disconnected because of some silly credit limit issue. For that they had sent an ambiguous email only a day earlier without any warning.

The connection was re-activated only after payment of excess amount on my monthly bill  which was due on April 24th. I lost the interest for 14 days .. yes … banks nowadays pay interest on a daily basis !

This incidence was just an addition to the poor experience Tata Photon Plus which I am facing was last three months.

• First of all the connection is indecently expensive. To activate the connection I had to pay 3500/- for the modem which is not refundable ! And the made-in-china device will be obsolete in India’s 3G era.
• The Quality of Service(QoS) is very poor during peak hours, the speed will be around 10 Kbps .. strike contrast to 3.1 Mbps, the speed with which the service is marketed. I think in dial-up-connection days the things used to be much better. I can understand the drastic increase in user-base but the telco should respond by gradually upgrading their infrastructure. I am sure it won’t be a very big investment especially in the business with an average profit margin of 35-40%.
• Last but not the least is the abrupt disconnection mentioned above. There was no explicit or implicit warning in the email mentioning that my connection will be disconnected very next day. There were no phone calls, no invoice for the interim payment. What was the rationale behind it ? thinking that I am going runaway to an unknown location without paying the bill. How can they even dare to think a customer can do so especially after paying 3500 INR for the modem? Also, do they expect customers to get in dreams that “Error 678” while connecting means “Connection disconnected on account of exceeding credit limit” ?

ps: This post has been written using an offline editor. Doing it online on a Tata photon connection would have ages :)

Updates:

Had shared the link of this post in twitter and got a reply from the TataTelCustCare.