India's Broadband,Telecom Companies – Bad Customer Care,Overbilling,Overcharging built into DNA as they Loot Millions of Dollars From the Very Poorest

India’s Broadband companies have bad customer care,overbilling and overcharging built into the DNA as there are no fear of reprisals and fines.Coupled with horrific customer care,broadband service in India is a continuous bad experience with all companies uniformly bad.An examination by the regulator TRAI of the broadband providers email and records will surely reveal the fraud that takes place with customers.Note this is not confined to one company or sector.These companies do not leave out even poor prepaid customers most of them who are illerate and survice on less than $2 day.

It is a common practice amongst these companies to add value added services like caller tunes without the customer’s permission which is totally illegal.Since most of the customers do not know how the billing is happening and do not know how to turn it off,these companies make millions of dollars in illegal profits from such customers.Airtel,Reliance and other major telecom companies in India follow this practice widely and openly.Nobody is going to complain about 50c/month being charged wrongly by the telecom provider.However 50c multiplied by a 100 million customers is neat $50 million in profits for these companies.This overbilling of customers even extends to broadband customers as I recently found out .After a nightmarish experience with Tata Indicom whose pathetic customer service forced me to change to Airtel,I found a blatant case of overcharging of money in my very first bill.

The company Airtel had neatly added a Rs 100 extra charge for using a anti-virus software called “airtel pc secure” when i distinctly remember never asking for the software.The engineer who installed it and the salesperson who sold it never mentioned the fact and I never asked for it as I use a very good free anti-software and never in my dreams use a software from a telecom provider (why not go for Norton ). The customer care service is so bad at airtel that the number mentioned on the bill “121” for complaints does not work.The call centre operator says that the number works for prepaid customers even when the broadband bill mentions the number.Other numbers don’t work so I am forced to email the appleate authority (god knows what that means).After 2 days of not recieving a reply,when a mail says you should get a reply in 24 hours,airtel responds by saying they are removing the charge on my bill as a “Goodwill gesture”.The gall of the company is quite amazing,after having clearly committed a mistake (which I think is very widespread and not a mistake at all) the company acts descending on the customer.

Note other companies are equally as bad if not worse because of the lax regulation by the regulator which are mostly favorable to the big companies.This is the reason why the broadband and telecom companies manage to get away with murder and massive profits.Next time you hear the most ethical company or best governed company goes to Airtel,Tata,Reliance or the others,think of the millions being looted from the very poorest.