I am a victim of the Sify Broadband scam in Delhi

05 Mar 2005 Comments

General broadband / delhi / internet / ISP / personal / sify / tech

Here is the letter I sent to Sify contact points in Delhi yesterday. It chronicles my Sify broadband experience here in Delhi.

From: Sandip Bhattacharya To: Sanjay Bhandari , Puneet Sharma , anamika Cc: India Gii Subject: Official complaint - My sify experience and a request for refund Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 14:21:23 +0530 Mailer: Evolution 2.0.2 (2.0.2-3) I had applied for a sify connection exactly a week ago, and paid a cheque on the same day. I got this connection via your franchisee Indraprastha Infotech at IP Extention (Patparganj), Delhi. It first took me scores of calls to them for convincing them to actually install at my premises. They happen to have a base station in the same apartment, and adding my line actually took them about one hour. But it still took them four days to come over and set up my connection(the person who collected the cheque promised to do it in two days). During installation at my residence, the service people saw that there were losses in the line. However they went back saying that the problem was elsewhere and promising that the problem would get solved soon. It took another round of repeated calls to Indraprastha to provide me with my login id. I logged in to my account that night and saw my balance to be Rs. 885 (as compared to the Rs. 995 I paid for advance monthly rental, but that is a separate story). Since this Monday, I have probably been online only about 20-30 minutes. The network gateway has continuously been inaccessible to me. I have been calling your reseller several times every day. Either he gives me some white lie about sending some people over to my place, or he simply keeps his phone switched off (especially after 6pm). The non-MTNL customer care number on your broadband web page, doesnt work ("number does not exist"). I had changed my network card the day before yesterday. After that, when for a moment, the gateway became accessible and I tried to login, I was given the message that my "computer ID" has changed. There was a phone number in the error message. Thankfully, that number worked and I could call up sify customer care. (Why isnt this number on the website?) I was told by the customer care executive that you implement mac binding, and the executive reset my mac address. I could log in, but while I was talking to the person, the gateway again became inaccessible. Since then I have made repeated calls to sify customer care, and they have promised to send somebody to see to my problem but nothing has happened yet. Your franchise is still inaccessible. When I visited their office sometime back, none of their internet related personnel were present. They run a cable tv network too, and these people asked me to come sometime later. Even if I call them now, they either put me on hold (and manually disconnect me after 5 minutes) or they keep the phone switched off. Now my situation is this: I had an existing cable internet connection before sify (hotwire) that I planned to give up after moving to sify. But considering what is happening, and considering my feeling that sify is totally unsuitable and unreliable for my needs, I still need to hang on to that connection. So this month, 1. I have already paid sify for setting up my connection Rs. 1300. 2. I have paid sify for a full months rental in advance Rs. 995. 3. I will be paying hotwire their monthly rental Rs. 880. The local hotwire reseller has the sweet habit of switching off the network whenever he runs out of power backup or there is a chance of a thunderstorm (to prevent his equipment getting damaged from electrical problems). So in these cases, I have to switch to dialup. My last month's dialup internet charges was Rs. 650. (I see some clouds outside today :( ) So thanks to sify I would be spending Rs. 3825 this month for an always- off "broadband" and an actually dialup connection. I have had enough of Sify. I have yet to see a trace of professionalism and reliability in its offerings. I would request you to refund my money and disconnect my connection, so that my losses are minimized. Thank you, Sandip Bhattacharya P.S. I am also sending this mail to a prominent all india telecom mailing list so that the members there are also sensitized about how Sify actually works in practice.

Update June 26 2005: Since the posting of this entry, I have been called up by somebody from Sify after about 2-3 months of the above incident happening. The Sify rep had called up to say that the networking problems have been fixed and I can resume my connection again(after 2+months!). This is apart from the calls I kept getting from them every month reminding me to renew my connection! Oh yes, before I forget, none of the people I had mailed the above ever reverted back. Of course, none of us are surprised, right?

I had also been called up by a prominent TV channel about whether I would like to appear in a televised consumer court serial where Sify personnel will listen to my complaint and resolve it “on the spot”. Sadly, I had to decline because I am convinced that Sify can never improve - their whole model is faulty, and till they change the model they can’t improve. Depending on unsupervised, untrained and unprofessional local franchises to manage a sophisticated neighbourhood network is never going to work. And people like Mr. Nangia (the Sify franchise I had unfortunately dealt with) are living examples of why Sify will and should fail.

This and my other page on Sify are thankfully on one of the first pages on popular Web searches for terms like “Sify broadband delhi”, and I am glad that people are visiting this place and learning how this company works. No company should underestimate the power of the common man, and of the web!

I would request other people having various kind of experiences with Sify to add their details below. It doesn’t necessarily have to be negative. In fact, if some people can post positive (but genuine) experiences, I think this will give a balanced view of the company.