Friday, September 25, 2015

Hassle in even disconnecting an already poor service - MTNL broadband - My story


A lot of MTNL users have stopped using MTNL in the last few years, as their service is becoming poorer by the day. I thought otherwise earlier, because luckily, for me, MTNL connection was working without a glitch for the last 6-7 years.

But recently, I had to experience the overall poor service of MTNL Delhi (Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited) when I moved to a new house. I'll tell you what made me decide disconnecting a 6-year old MTNL broadband connection.

MTNL's service has been very good at my older place(a different pin code but same exchange). A solid line with good speeds for unlimited connections at a fair price. I was a happy customer once.

Initially, I had some difficulties in getting them to shift the connection to the new home. The MTNL guys who came to install the connection at my new place were not able to make it working at all. As soon as I got past those problems and my Internet started working, I had new problems. Broadband will only work sometimes and with lesser speed than what I was paying for. I kept calling MTNL technical support and customer care again and again but every time I lodged a complaint, the very next day I could see, on their on-line complaint tracking tool, that it has been resolved. Although it would not. I even called the Area manager, but how can the area manager solve the problem when he keeps sending the same guys over and over again to solve the same problem which they were not able to fix firstly.

This continued for a month.

As broadband is a daily need, eventually I got fed up, had to give up my MTNL connection, land-line along-with.

It was not an easy affair to get the connection disconnected either. Firstly there is no option to do this on-line, which should have been the easiest for the customer and the ISP, both. You still need to fill-up a regular paper form and get it signed with various departments of MTNL, just to, should I say, get rid of the MTNL services! They even ask for a ID proof for the disconnection of MTNL services. Why need an ID proof when I am an already verified customer using MTNL services for so long?

For people who are fed up of MTNL's poor service and decide to disconnect -
Please make sure when you mark a reason for disconnection, simply choose shifting/moving to another city, for your own ease. In case you select 'Not satisfied from services' on the form, they will not submit the request for disconnection unless you get it signed from yet another department/section.

So what I understood from my experience with MTNL is that either they have good infrastructure laid out at some places and not at others. Or, specifically for our new area, the guys are not trained properly to troubleshoot/fix problems and the higher officials just do not care.

Later, I got myself installed the local cablewala's Hathway broadband.

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