Recently, I experienced a downtime of around 30 hours with my Airtel Xstream Fiber, prompting me to share my experience and compare it with Jio Fiber. So, I am going to split the experience into multiple parts.
Speed and Latency (Pings)
Airtel Xstream Fiber provides excellent speeds, almost 20-25% higher than the plan. These speeds are consistently higher, not just on Ookla speed tests. For my 200 Mbps plan, I consistently get 245-250 Mbps. For comparison, Jio Fiber provides 5-10% extra speed for the plan. The pings are also notably better than Jio. For some reason, Airtel Xstream Fiber feels smoother, perhaps due to better routing on Airtel's part. I experienced issues with Jio where some websites loaded extremely slowly, but that was not the case with Airtel. Whatever I opened on Airtel Xstream Fiber loaded instantly.
OTT
On my plan, I mainly get Amazon Prime Video (for 1 year), Disney Plus Hotstar Super, and Airtel Xstream Play (an OTT aggregator platform). I like Airtel Xstream Play because it loads videos super fast, almost as if you're playing them locally. So, I feel it is on par with Jio. However, it depends on what you want. For me, I bought the connection primarily for internet, and these are just add-ons.
Router and Freedom
Airtel provided me with a Nokia Router, which is superior to my existing Jio Router. It has better range and is fully unlocked, so I can easily bridge it with other routers too.
Service and Reliability
Here, I can confidently say Jio is better. I had Jio Fiber for more than 3 years, and even if I combine all the downtime over those 3 years, it would not have been more than 12 hours. It was reliable, whenever I needed internet, it was up. However, within 2 months of my Airtel connection, it went down for a straight 30 hours. The response I got from the Airtel team was horrible. I received messages after messages stating the connection would be resumed after a certain time, with each message providing a new deadline. Even on Twitter, I only received template replies, and there was almost no way to talk to customer care without going through their IVR. Since it was down in the whole area, they were not even registering my personal complaint. I have seen such incidents with Airtel Fiber where they can be out of service for days without proper resolution and response from the team, which I rarely experienced with Jio Fiber.
Conclusion
Overall, I am happy with Airtel Xstream Fiber for now, but if such downtimes occur again and again, I might switch back to Jio because reliability is of the utmost priority for me.
I'm expecting the same 99% uptime with Airtel Fiber as I've been getting with Jio for the last 3 years. Yes, it's a very old router. for me I get a B+ on Jio for buffer bloat, which may be due to an old router.
