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.

Each BSNL employee attending a customer phone call gives you another number. Its a monopolistic crime of un-imaginable proporations against indian broadband users. If there are a lot of people who feel the same please consider launching a movement to surrender BSNL phonelines. Convince your relatives to surrender a BSNL phoneline and serve the nation.

It is criminal to support inefficiency of BSNL through public money. Please consider writing to your elected representatives in favor of privatization of BSNL.

After visiting BSNL exchange 6 times and finally managing to get a broadband connection at my parent's place in Yamunanagar. One and a half months later I am still trying to get the authentication details to BSNL's portal for viewing dataflow http://bbservice.bsnl.in. Not that the damn site works anyway.

Update:
Interestingly amongst BSNL+MTNL customers some 4.4 million(100K/month approx.) plus wired phone lines were surrendered by their customers between Apr-2006 to Feb 2008.
Source DOT Network Status Feb 2008 .The same has been uploaded at my site because GOI sites have this annoying habit of removing content so if you are unable to access the previous link try this one DOT Network Status Report 2008

Which idiot runs mission critical trading sites on Winblows. Apparently ICICIDirect does. And they go down right in the middle of a trading day. Happening right now the IIS 500.13 error code web server too busy.

Update: 5 minutes later They are back in action, perhaps a (winblows)reboot or something helped.

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