The Hindu Business Line : Broadband base swelling; after-sales services lagging

MARKETING for the broadband service has gone into overdrive, and new connections are being taken up everyday. Though people marvel at the speeds their connections are achieving, and at how economical the deals turns out, others are seething at the after-sales service (or the lack of it).

Some complain that the personnel installing the service just don't know how go about it, and the system administrator has to step in.

Mr Brahmadathan, Chief General Manager, BSNL, Chennai, explains, "The problem is that each computer has different requirements. They may not be configured properly. Even IT professionals may struggle to solve these problems." The service personnel are not IT professionals, but telecom staff trained to suit broadband needs.

Mr E. V. S. Chakravarthy, CEO, Iqara Telecom, agrees, saying, "The PC infrastructure of each customer may not be updated. It could be a Pentium 2 or an older version of Windows or even a different operating system. I'm not saying there are no flaws in our infrastructure, but these are some of the difficulties we face."

Sify Broadband, for example, has initiated a `Kaizen' programme for its subscribers to identify and eliminate every weak spot, said Mr Srikanth Joshi, President-Access Media, Sify Ltd.

But that isn't the only problem.

Ms Shobha Iyer, Coordinator of Citizen Consumer and Civic Action Group (CAG), says, "Their agents make a lot of promises, because it's their job to sell the product. But the technical people are simply not able to implement those promises. And while their call centre help line services are excellent, it is impossible to go beyond them to the technical people — they are more like `wall-centres' really."

Some of the more tech-savvy customers complain that the promised speed, be it 256 kbps or higher, is only the `burst speed,' and is not a constant stream.

In reply to this, Mr Joshi says, "Sify Broadband services are a combination of wireless and last mile Ethernet technology. This enables us to give the promised speeds to the customer end to end. Speeds promised to the customer are best experienced within the Sify network," he adds.

This means that when you leave the immediate network and surf the net, you are visiting Web sites that could be clogged, or a busy server, which would slow down the connection.

Mr Brahmadathan said, "We do not guarantee a through-put speed of 256 kbps, because you might be on a busy server, your own computer might be slow. What we guarantee is a minimum access speed of 256 kbps."

The broadband customer base is not likely to reach the target size of 1.5 lakh by December 2005. In Chennai, for example, there are 45,000 customers — Chennai and Bangalore are the biggest markets for broadband in the country. Perhaps as these problems sort themselves out, the customer base will inch closer to the target.

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Broadband base swelling; after-sales services lagging