I am a user of airtel mobile services for the past 8 years and broadband services for the past 5 years. this complaint is regarding airtel broadband in one of my offices in hyderabad. We requested for change of address on 4th Nov-10. Airtel people checked the new location and said the services are not available there. I requested for disconnection as we are vacating current premises. On Nov 5th, they de-activated the connection. We moved to new location on 5th Nov.
However, they continued to generate the bill till Jan-11. During this period we kept complaining about the same. They stopped billing after that but started pestering us for paying the bills of dec-10 and Jan. After numerous calls, the legal department (Hyderabad), the technical department and myself had a conference call. The technical department person, after verifying the logs, informed me that they re-activated our account on 8th Nov. Hence the bills were generated. the legal department woman was adamant that ~2500 inr is due and the bill has to be settled.
My repeated mails/ requests to the service department, ombudsman failed to elicit any response.
After further discussion, she agreed to settle for 500 inr as final settlement. She asked me to pay the amount to their billing person and later she will send the no dues certificate. Their representative and I paid the amount in April (Big mistake). With in couple of weeks their legal department from Calcutta called me asking to pay ~2000 or else face legal consequences. Needless to say I was shocked and asked them to go ahead. In third week of jun-11, I got a call from their legal arbitrator/ Delhi saying that they intend to sue me in delhi and explained the costs of visiting/legal expenses would exceed the 1800 so why not pay up. I asked him to go ahead with the process. Then i had a discussion with my lawyer. He said it might cost 6~7000 to defend but my time will be wasted a lot. Also, it seems Airtel is "trying to take revenge" by filing a case in delhi to harass so they might focus on troubling you a lot. Though I was willing to fight for the cause, the costs seem unjustified. Hence as per his advise, talked to the arbitrator and settled the dues.
While I like their service quality, I realised their behavior borders on intimidation/coercion. I feel like i have paid a bribe to save my time. Hopefully i will find a way to recover this money one way or the other in future. Meanwhile, I have decided to "say no to airtel" for rest of my life. We are moving personal/ business communications other service providers. Better to go to a low service provider rather than over pay to a behemoth whose behavior borders on thuggery. Atleast, i will reduce their revenue by 10000 inr/ month (thats what we pay to airtel for various services)
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