Airtel DSL troubles - part deux

[cheeni]

This is a post with further details about my tryst with Airtel and their not-so-great high-speed DSL plan. Please read on if you are interested in this sort of thing - what follows is my conversation with technical support, some useful debugging information if you are on Airtel and the secret location of their non-flaky DNS servers.



Ok, so I had to deal with the usual non-technical support person and hold tunes for 10+ minutes before I spoke to a "technical support" person who was sadly not much more technical than the first port of call. Anyway, I had them confirm for the record that I was indeed being billed for the 2mbps plan and then laid out my case.

Exhibit 1: My device information from the DSL modem's config page




But, since they had a script to read and I had a part to play they naturally couldn't accept my word and had me jump a bunch of useless hoops - since I knew this was coming and resistance was futile I did what they asked. Of course I snapped at one point when I was asked multiple times to open Internet explorer and cmd from the start menu and told them I was not using Windows. This confused the agent for a while and then he continued reading from his script - *shrug* at least I tried.

1. They had me visit their unlisted "Official Bandwith meter site". Ok, so net result, the page read "Your current bandwidth reading is: 482.20kbps which means you can download at 60.27 KB/sec. from our Network to your last mile provision."

2. The tech agent had me re-configure the DSL router with the exact same settings it had in the first place, except he wanted me to rename the profile - like that helps.

3. He told me to check my DNS servers and so I got nasty and told him they (Airtel) couldn't run a half-decent DNS service - I was given more IP addresses - so the unpublished, but supposedly better DNS servers to use are:

202.56.250.5 and 202.56.230.5

Well, do they work?

$nslookup mail.google.com 202.56.250.5
Server:		202.56.250.5
Address:	202.56.250.5#53

Non-authoritative answer:
*** Can't find mail.google.com: No answer

Heh, nope...

Finally, I have a complaint number and an assurance that Airtel's finest will be on the case and I should expect a "response" (note, not resolution, but response) in 24 hours.

No, they did not ask me if they had been helpful at the end of the call, I think they knew my answer.

Comments

Same story, another ISP

[sunson.livejournal.com]

BSNL DataOne's DNS sucks big time too. I have nailed down two sets of 'usable' DNS servers (there are tonnes more that can be found on various blogs but they fall much below the two): One that is consistent with giving an answer but is painfully slow. Another that is blazing fast but is flaky 'sometimes' (like 1 in every 3 queries fail :) ). I figured, running a caching DNS on my PC works decently along side this 'flaky' DNS server.

Re: Same story, another ISP

[sriniram.livejournal.com]

I really wish I could run a DNS cache on my WRT54G, but it looks like I will have to flash the firmware to run Linux and generally muck around a whole lot.