Bharti Airtel Ltd is one of the better ISPs in India. However their chief problem has been the lot of un-solicited pre-recorded voice calls and SMS spam they generate to annoy their customers in their quest for VAS profits. Advice to them: Get back to basics and fire your fugly marketers, reduce expenses and provide what people want, there is a lot of market in small towns where BSNL is the evil monopoly and your next billion rupee revenue is assured by expanding over there. Quality of service and billing was not an area they were castigated much until now. As a shareholder who holds a puny number of shares I hate to see them annoy paying customers like Balaji and yours truly. My medium term tip for Bharti Airtel stock would be 'SELL' they are going the Vodafone way of growth through acquisitions without worrying about existing customers.

Update May 24, 2008: Bharti has pulled out of the MTN acquisition deal. Good for them and good for its customers.

7:30pm, 15th Feb, 2008 , Bangalore, Karnataka, India
Airtel Customer Care response to my complaint:
'Sir we have server problem and outgoing calls shall only work after two hours'

Dear Airtel,

I like your explanation. I thought you outsourced your 'server operations' to a large blue colored MNC, did you bother to sign an SLA with them.

-Tarun

Finally after running around from piller to post, to BSNL, to Tata Indicom and to whoever would listen to me. I finally got Airtel to give me a 256Kbps(un-limited) Broadband connection. The Airtel guy claimed that this is the last port they had available in this area and I am lucky to get it the connection otherwise I could have waited for months at end for a broadband connection.

The Airtel sales guy insisted that I provide them a copy of my PAN card as this is the new TRAI regulation, so much for the year of broadband.

Airtel happens to be one of those service providers against whom I have seen least number of complaints and their loyal subscriber's actually defend them against criticism. I hope they meet my expectations just as well. Except for them 'spamming' their customers with mindless SMS'es and pre-recorded phone spam messages their service levels are actually better than other players.

Broadband according to TRAI is defined as an always on 256Kbps or above connection. For those of you in computer networking field know that broadband is 'nickname' for the technology leveraging multiple frequencies over the wire ethernet (or wirelessly) instead of just baseband frequency that normal ethernet for a LAN utilizes.

Airtel broadband installation 'engineer' also informed me that they offer an on-demand games service for just another 199 Rupees(+Taxes) and they have over 150 games. Good for them. Not sure how well it compares to gametap. My favorite strategy games seem to be all available at gametap.

One piece of advocacy I have always done is that Internet connectivity in India is always going to have similar usage of broadband as rest of the world, there is no point leveraging the Indian connection for most online services. Create world class services at indian pricing and you'll see an uptake of services. The youth in India are as happy to use youtube or orkut and now facebook as anywhere else in the world. There is little beyond property, classifieds, travel, news, shaadi and naukri that needs to leverage the indian connection, least of all gaming, gamers go where other gamers go.

To use Airtel blackberry as a softmodem. Follow the howto or here for linux using xmblackberry.
The modem initialization parameters for airtel are
+CGDCONT=1,"IP","airtelgprs.com" and the number to dial is *99# and no username and password is needed.
I am able to use ssh though there is high latency but haven't been able to use PPTP based VPN which runs on protocol 47(GRE) over IP directly, although I suspect an SSL based VPN might work.

Update:
Yes you need to install the Desktop Manager as well and make sure you can access your blackberry from the Desktop Manager.