After seeing here all the new posts on airtel xstream fiber, I decided to write my experience on completing 2 months with my airtel black connection.
I raised a new connection request on 20th of February 2025, the connection got installed the next morning. I wanted to take 200Mbps plan but went with 40Mbps initially because my jiofiber prepaid connection had 1 month left and wanted to test airtel before completely switching to it. So, I took airtel black plan 699, which included fiber and iptv. Paid 2500 as advance amount. The technicians did the installation professionally and were very cooperative. I got h660 router. Also opted for choice landline number (details later).
The first change i noticed in comparison to jiofiber was the loaded latency. On airtel its almost perfect without any need to setup queue or QoS. Speeds are according to the plan but it does not exceed the plan limit at all in comparison to jiofiber where it does.
One of the irritating thing I faced was the Airtel_(wifiname) as wifi ssid. Via app we cannot remove airtel name but we can do once we login directly on to the router page. My main plan was anyway to enable bridge mode and disable airtel ont wifi totally but these restrictions are still silly.
Overall internet experience has been pretty good and far better than jiofiber. Hence after a month of testing I raised a request to upgrade my plan to 1099 via airtel thanks app and enabled bridge mode on 23rd March 2025 and this is where things got wrong for me. My main plan got upgraded, iptv plan was updated, bridge mode was enabled but my fiber plan was stuck at 40Mbps plan. Called customer support, every day since 24th March but every time i got the same reply stating we have highlighted the issue to the back end team and it will be resolved after 24hrs. Even sent emails but nothing got sorted, tehcinicians came resetted the router and boom my bridge mode is gone, back to basics
. Contacted local airtel fiber head, told her the issue and she acknowledged the problem with my plan and finally after 3 days on 2nd April my plan change request was finally resolved. It took full 8 days for this small issue to be resolved.
Then I finally again raised the request for activation of bridge mode and the same was configured the next day, and the pppoe connection was now being established via my mikrotik router. The other issue remaining was that the choice landline number I opted for is still under provisioning even after 2 months, and the local team had to update on the same and just shared that the request was still under process. Till now I had realized that the choice number wasn't gonna happen soon.
Then on 3rd March 2025 I got a message that I will face downtime for 12 hrs due to some technical issues in my area!! And it was actually a 12 hrs disruption. Connection got restored around 3AM. After that till today 15/04/2025 everything was working smoothly. But today again got a message about service disruption at 7am and expected time was 1:30pm the same day. Surprisingly, got service restoration message around 7:45am but nothing was working. I raised the request via local airtel fiber team, technician arrived around 12noon, telling me that my whole area is having this disruption. Still the NOC team over call was adamant to acknowledge the area wide issue and wanted to reset my router, which i resisted because bridge mode configuration will be gone from my router and I will have to raise the request again to enable bridge mode. But the NOC person refused to help when router was set on bridge mode and was so confident that everything will work once I allow them to set pppoe connection on their airtel router, so just to break his confidence I agreed to it
. After resetting the router has was unable to use ACS (tr-069) and that is when he went silent and told there is some problem with the OLT!!!! Both technician and I were repeatedly telling him that its an area wide issue,but he didnt listen. Its 8pm and the connection is still not working. God knows how many days will it take to restore the connection. Will probably disconnect the connection now.
Overall I feel on the internet side of things Airtel is better than jiofiber for sure. But on the customer support side jiofiber is better as far my experience is concerned. For eg: on airtel my service requests were not escalated automatically even if the resolution time was crossed. Whereas on jiofiber the technical team had to resolve the complaint within a given time frame. Though the local installation team of airtel are well informed about the technical aspects vs the jiofiber team.
Regarding OTT subscription, I hate the fact that barring zee5, appletv and hotstar, all other app can only be accessed via xtream play app. My previous OTT apps profiles are unusable now. Also, hotstar has 2 login devices limit, whereas never faced any such restrictions via jiofiber.
And on the IPTV box, it works fine. I dont watch tv channels at all so haven't been using it much.
I raised a new connection request on 20th of February 2025, the connection got installed the next morning. I wanted to take 200Mbps plan but went with 40Mbps initially because my jiofiber prepaid connection had 1 month left and wanted to test airtel before completely switching to it. So, I took airtel black plan 699, which included fiber and iptv. Paid 2500 as advance amount. The technicians did the installation professionally and were very cooperative. I got h660 router. Also opted for choice landline number (details later).
The first change i noticed in comparison to jiofiber was the loaded latency. On airtel its almost perfect without any need to setup queue or QoS. Speeds are according to the plan but it does not exceed the plan limit at all in comparison to jiofiber where it does.
One of the irritating thing I faced was the Airtel_(wifiname) as wifi ssid. Via app we cannot remove airtel name but we can do once we login directly on to the router page. My main plan was anyway to enable bridge mode and disable airtel ont wifi totally but these restrictions are still silly.
Overall internet experience has been pretty good and far better than jiofiber. Hence after a month of testing I raised a request to upgrade my plan to 1099 via airtel thanks app and enabled bridge mode on 23rd March 2025 and this is where things got wrong for me. My main plan got upgraded, iptv plan was updated, bridge mode was enabled but my fiber plan was stuck at 40Mbps plan. Called customer support, every day since 24th March but every time i got the same reply stating we have highlighted the issue to the back end team and it will be resolved after 24hrs. Even sent emails but nothing got sorted, tehcinicians came resetted the router and boom my bridge mode is gone, back to basics
. Contacted local airtel fiber head, told her the issue and she acknowledged the problem with my plan and finally after 3 days on 2nd April my plan change request was finally resolved. It took full 8 days for this small issue to be resolved.Then I finally again raised the request for activation of bridge mode and the same was configured the next day, and the pppoe connection was now being established via my mikrotik router. The other issue remaining was that the choice landline number I opted for is still under provisioning even after 2 months, and the local team had to update on the same and just shared that the request was still under process. Till now I had realized that the choice number wasn't gonna happen soon.
Then on 3rd March 2025 I got a message that I will face downtime for 12 hrs due to some technical issues in my area!! And it was actually a 12 hrs disruption. Connection got restored around 3AM. After that till today 15/04/2025 everything was working smoothly. But today again got a message about service disruption at 7am and expected time was 1:30pm the same day. Surprisingly, got service restoration message around 7:45am but nothing was working. I raised the request via local airtel fiber team, technician arrived around 12noon, telling me that my whole area is having this disruption. Still the NOC team over call was adamant to acknowledge the area wide issue and wanted to reset my router, which i resisted because bridge mode configuration will be gone from my router and I will have to raise the request again to enable bridge mode. But the NOC person refused to help when router was set on bridge mode and was so confident that everything will work once I allow them to set pppoe connection on their airtel router, so just to break his confidence I agreed to it
. After resetting the router has was unable to use ACS (tr-069) and that is when he went silent and told there is some problem with the OLT!!!! Both technician and I were repeatedly telling him that its an area wide issue,but he didnt listen. Its 8pm and the connection is still not working. God knows how many days will it take to restore the connection. Will probably disconnect the connection now.Overall I feel on the internet side of things Airtel is better than jiofiber for sure. But on the customer support side jiofiber is better as far my experience is concerned. For eg: on airtel my service requests were not escalated automatically even if the resolution time was crossed. Whereas on jiofiber the technical team had to resolve the complaint within a given time frame. Though the local installation team of airtel are well informed about the technical aspects vs the jiofiber team.
Regarding OTT subscription, I hate the fact that barring zee5, appletv and hotstar, all other app can only be accessed via xtream play app. My previous OTT apps profiles are unusable now. Also, hotstar has 2 login devices limit, whereas never faced any such restrictions via jiofiber.
And on the IPTV box, it works fine. I dont watch tv channels at all so haven't been using it much.
