Airtel — Internet connectivity, issue not resolved even after multiple complaints

Address:

Gurgaon, Haryana

I have been using Airtel's 2G service for some time now. For the last 10 days, the network connectivity has been extremely poor. I live on an institutional campus and a quick check with the student community showed that I wasn't the only one, most 2G users with Airtel were facing the same issue. I lodged a complaint with the Airtel consumer help (Complaint no. 369217) Sunday (16/11/14) evening. Note that the executive insisted I check my network settings, and only after I insisted that there were connectivity issues in my region did he agree to look into the problem. However, nothing changed. I tried calling Consumer Help again on Tuesday (18/11/14), as the connection had totally stopped by then, but was unable to connect to an executive. Thereafter, I filed an online complaint on Airtel's website (Receipt no. PR[protected], and the confirmation mail assured response within two hours. However, nothing improved and nobody contacted me from Airtel. Eventually, I posted a complaint on Airtel's facebook handle, which was immediately responded to, asking me to inbox my phone number. As a follow up, an executive from Airtel did contact me in the morning on the 19th, however, he again asked me to reset my network settings. I told him that the settings were fine, that I had reset them, but the executive insisted that I do it once again. I agreed to do so, on his assurance that if resetting did not solve the problem, he would forward the complaint to the networks team. He offered to call me back in some time, to verify if the problem had been resolved. As expected, resetting did not solve my problem and the executive failed to contact me thereafter. I was again left in a lurch. By night, I decided to put up the status again on my post on their facebook page, as that was the only place they seemed to reply. After explaining my situation, the answer I received was far from satisfactory, stating "Hi Kriti, this is with reference to our discussion, we have taken your address as an input for future planning and we will keep you updated towards the same. Regards' Dhrub". Further comments that I made were completely ignored by the admins. Incidentally, I know at least 10 more people who use Airtel's 2G network, live in the same hostel and have been facing the same problem for 10 days now. And there are ore users as well. Some of them have lodged complaints themselves, and have been dealt with similarly (askied t change network settings). One person in fact was promised that an engineer would be sent to the campus to get the network checked, but no one contacted him again and no engineer was sent. Fellow users who also wrote their complaints as a follow up of my complaint on the facebook page, were ignored and the Airtel admins handling the page deleted their complaints. This is totally unacceptable behaviour on the part of Airtel. We are facing issues because of lack of internet connectivity, the data packs that we have purchased from Airtel are going in vain, and Airtel refuses to acknowledge our situation, only ask us to repeatedly change our network settings. Help would be really appreciated!