The basic fault with Sify Broadband is clear…

5 months with Sify Broadband has pretty much explained to me what’s wrong with the service in the first place. And the problem is that little is being done to fix the mess they have created…

Here are my assumptions (obviously I am not an insider):

They chose to jump into the bandwagon without much planning. They wanted to expand as much as possible so they went the way of cable wallas as their dealers. People who are not exactly known for their customer support and quality of services. And best of all they went into this with little idea of what happens in the real world. The CTO claims they were mislead by Sify guys into laying wrong type of cables initially which could not as I saw it last week the hot temperatures of Panchkula. The power dropped with distance, the power adapters blew up and cabling gets damaged. Now they took 4 days to replace the wiring to my home, the net is finally working after a week. With the total downtime for this month standing at 13 days out of 19! These are the days which had more than 4 hours of working time downtime. And I am pretty sure, 8-9 days the net was down for more than 12 hours and 5-6 days complete failure of net for the whole time.

This of course does not sound very nice. And when the CTO knocks on your door and advices you to get fiber cable connectivity (costing around 15K) for a reliable service, it sounds painful. Considering I shifted to Panchkula only after getting a commitment from the Sify guys that they would be providing me a reliable connection 24×7 in the package they were offering (the installation I paid was a hefty by any standard 3500 bucks). Plus I was promised 24×7 customer support (by a local guy not a customer care center located in Chennai). Well nothing like that now… considering the CTO now says that he can’t serve me coz I call him too much and does not let him provide me good service! Also, in addition one of the local guys even thought it was funny when he said that he had to get his mobile number changed so that he could escape my calls! These are the guys who are here to serve you! And they find it funny that they had to find ways to escape receiving complaints from us the customer!

And when he asked for 4 days (during which net DID NOT WORK AT ALL), he was not exactly sad that I would not be able to work at all during that downtime. This is during the period which is real life scenario and my income depends upon his Sify broadband services… The best he could offer was to get me a Sify dialup package (of course not the telephone bills). So, I pay 24 bucks an hour for the time they needed to fix the network that should have been fixed in the first place…

I don’t think this could have happened if they had planned for a 6 month (or at least 3 months) testing phase. A phase during which they would take 100 users providing them services for free of course and get the services tested in real time. The way reliance worked in the beginning (though the mobile was not free, the calls were), and perhaps the same way Reliance’s Bharat Broadband would be being tested right now. But nope, the tests are being done in real world scenario for which the normal customer is paying. And I paid with money and loss of a regular job and 4 projects in the last 2 months…