The Startup Guy

 Updates: (Still UNRESOLVED)

• Since the tweet went out  yesterday, we got a few calls from Airtel. They are looking into the issue. They promised a resolution in 24 hours. Wednesday 23/Nov 1:38pm.
• Thanks to the guys at MyAkosha who have been helping to atleast get the Collection agency calls to stop. A call an hour was driving me mad.
• Have sent an email to TRAI to the Director of Broadband Services, explaining the issue. Wednesday 24/Nov 2:24pm
• Nitin of Corp Comm calls and says its unfortunate that he has to say the “stereotypical answer” – That I will have to pay and the bill is valid. Reason: the plan was a 50GB plan and everything beyond that was billed, and its not an unlimited plan. I quite remember that thats not what the technician who came over to switch the plans said. They also cant prove that there has been heavy usage. Nov 23 3:00pm
• No updates at all on 24th November.
• Had a brief chat in a Radio Programme on Chennai Live in the Breakfast Show about this issue. Got a call from Someone in Airtel Chennai wanting to do a Sit down. Have suggested if they could solve this problem rather than getting into negotiation mode. Time is a bit of a constrain. She thanked for the time and hung up. Still waiting for a resolution. November 25th
• Still remains unresolved. I get a few calls from Collection agencies, I iterate the whole story, and never hear from them again. Feb 1, 2012

Hi. My Name is Vijay Anand and I run a small business which is a few months old. It essentially means everything is tied to budgets and we cannot afford to make lavish expenses. The rule is simple, if we go on that path, we won’t live to tell the tale about it.

When we setup the space, our first logical choice was  Airtel to power our broadband. Why? This is a company that we have been proud of. Ive been with IIT Madras for the past six years and when we talk to people about how amazingly well we do in terms of the telecom infrastructure, and how we can deliver world class infrastructure at prices people cannot imagine, the first brand to quote has been Airtel.  So Airtel it was. I am not going to say we had issues with the installation, all went fine. It took a bit of time, but it was up.

By default we were set on a 256kbps Plan, but upgraded it to the Airtel 8mbps, 50Gb plan. It would set us back by about 3K each month, 2999Rs Plus taxes and we were fine with it. I asked the technician, what would happen once we cross the 50GB. His answer was that it would drop to a 256kbps “fair-use” pipe, and there were no additional charges involved. All was good and I was so far, happy.

The first month goes off and I get an SMS towards the end of the month saying that the unbilled amount is somewhere around Rs.60,000. My heart almost stops for a second. No sooner I get a call  from a representative who says that my credit limit has been breached and we need to make payment immediately. I ask him what is my other option. He says we can wait for the bill to be generated. I am not sure why we are even having this conversation if the bill hasnt been generated so I take the option. Lo and behold, the billing cycle date arrives, and I get an SMS saying the total is some Rs. 3000 Rs. Apparently they have been monitoring and billing me on a per KB metric and then once the plan got slapped on it, it went back to the Plan.

This Shock and relief went on for Three months. We got the service in May, and June and July went on the same way but somehow mysteriously they would all align to the 3K that i had signed up for.Bills were settled. I realized that they had a rather weird way of going about this. When I spoke to customer care, their suggestion was to ask the credit limit team to increase my limit so that I wouldn’t get those calls. I wasn’t even sure why I was “owing” 60K when my plan clearly wasn’t supposed to go beyond 3K. I let that pass.

Why do I have to worry about how Airtel goes about dealing with Billing? Unfortunately I should have. (Someone else has a blog post on it here)

August arrives, and I get the same SMS. By this time I am thinking that I should ignore it. The credit limit team hasnt called me yet, which I thought was a surprise. But then the bill arrives, for 35K. I am shocked out of my life, but say to myself that the team forgot to slap the plan on this time and hence the issue. Even in the previous bills, I would get an attachment of “per KB usage” and billed to some atrocious amount and then reduced to 3K. I call customer care and let them know the issue. I am told that they upgraded a billing software and its causing havoc everywhere, but it will get fixed. I’ve never had an issue with Airtel never fixing their issues once brought to their notice, so I consider it as work done and carry on with my business (literally)

I get a bill the next month – I am wondering by now how they never bothered to try to get me to pay the amount. I remember a few calls coming in from collection agencies but I told them that there is a billing dispute and they hung up and never bothered to call back. So August passes by and September comes in. My billing cycle is on the 16th of every month. I get a bill saying 35K Outstanding, and another 30K something on top of it. That brings it to the awesome total of some 65K due. I call the customer care again and leave a ticket. (Ticket ID 4757836). After wading through the maze that the airtel customer care is, he laughs about the issue says its definitely an error and tells me it will get fixed by Oct 4th. Again I believe them.

I get a bill on the 18th of October stating that I have 67K + 38,599 pending to a sum total of 1,05,938 Rs. Just stop here for a second and think about how off we are. For a Plan that is priced at 3K, totalling to a business expense of 10K, we were being billed 10 times more.

Airtel Bill

And thats when I realized that the Nightmare had begun.

The interesting thing is that nothing has changed from our end. We are a business, so there is no massive downloads going on here, even though promptly airtel sends the Speed on Demand note a few days into our every DNS resolution. I’ll get to that in a minute. But you might be curious how life was before August right? Here’s a snapshot.

So that was our “Regular” signed up bill amount and payments made. What we couldnt explain was where it was before and what it jumped to, for no apparent reason. The biggest download that I know of that happened here was the OSX Lion Update and the iOS 5.0 update. I am sure there were a few other downloads, people download ISOs of various work environments as they setup AWS instances, but nothing that can substantiate us EVER crossing 50GB. Period.

The Big Analysis:

1. Technician during first call says there was a mistake because of the billing software upgrade. Did something happen there?

2. In one of the later calls, one of the technicians mentioned that they “accidentally” switched plans and that was the mistake.

3. I still am not sure how they could accidentally switch us from, to what. After the 50GB was over (lets just assume that Airtel DOES calculate it right, because I am hearing from several people that it starts showing that they have used up bandwidth way before the time and even in cases where people were not at home), it drops us into a 256kbps connection. Why would they charge us atrocious rates for that?

4. You will notice from the snapshot of bill below (this was one of the lowest) that there is a significant download beyond the 50GB. Is the claim that this was done on a 256kbps? Really?

For those of you who are interested in seeing the bill in its entirely. Here’s a link:

Note: You will realize that there are multiple instances of “sessions” there and it all adds up to a lot of hours in a day – sometimes way more than 24 hours? Assuming that they are timestamps, it still doesnt add up to the fact that on a 256kbps connection, past the 50GB (I am still assuming that it somehow magically happened) you can download so much in that timespan.

One or many of these things happened here:

1. Airtel seriously screwed up their billing system

2. They have no clue how to monitor usage. There are countless folks who are testifying to that affect.

3. They accidentally switched plans and put me from a capped plan to a per usage plan. But somehow we still got the “You have finished your quota, click on Speed on Demand” page, and had internet crawling at 256kbps

4. They sold the receivable to a collection agency who is calling, and despite technicians calling and agreeing that there has been an issue, not able to do anything.

5. Corp Comm (thats what they claim, though Mahesh Murthy says they are Customer Care) team claims that they close tickets even before they are resolved, right after they make the call. I’ve had more than a dozen calls with these people and with the struggle that it takes to get through customer care. Everytime its a matter of repeating the story over and over again.

6. There is no one there with logic in the team. I keep getting their answer that they are investigating. How does a 3K “fixed price plan” by any measure cross more than that amount. Whats there to investigate? No idea.

7. I really wish they could have told me whatever they are saying about fixed plans etc, in the first bill when I raised an issue. Customer Care blatantly told me its a billing issue and it will be resolved and three months went by, while they billed away atrociously. Why couldnt they tell me that this was a plan issue and i need to upgrade to a better plan then itself? And why did the guy who come to meet me and explain the plan, say with so much confidence – despite repeated asking – that it was an unlimited plan?

It takes sweat and blood to build a business in India. One request is that Airtel not add to that burden. It would greatly help.

There is a trend going on on twitter under the hashtag #airtel. Do join in if you’d like to understand more about this.