Prateek Dayal

I got reliance wimax connection about a month and a half back and I would say its pretty good in terms of speed (I am on the Rs 750/-, 4 GB download plan) but bad in some other ways and nightmarish in some actually. Technically speaking the service goes down for like a day almost every week. This is very frustrating as it comes back predictably in the evening.

Another big issue is with their billing. I got a call today saying that my last bill is about Rs 2100. This came as a shock to me as I am on the Rs 750 a month plan with 4 GB download free in that. Now I am pretty sure that I have not crossed the 4 GB download limit. Now this portal reliancebroadband.co.in is pretty unusable because most things don’t work very well. Half the time it says your usage details cannot be shown as system is going upgradatation !!!! (They can bill me for that usage but cannot show it ..)

I go back and check the usage for the 1 month and it shows me for the first 15 days … Here is a snapshot of one of the screens

As you can see in the screen on 27th I have used around 397000+ MBs which is around 400 GB. With this kind of billing sofware, they have sent me a bill of 2k+. I check my unbilled usage (for about a week and it says 3 GB! and after I complained it started showing as 1.2 GB .. great !)

Now comes the worst part: I register a complaint by emailing them (The guy on call won’t take the complaint). I get acknowledged for the email with a complaint number and next day my internet connection is disconnected. I call up and the guy says I should pay my bill and he cannot give me more details. I send another email and after sometime a guy calls me to say that please go to a webworld and pay Rs 3k . Now this is ridiculous .. My due date for bill is 13th September and I am being asked to pay the last bill and some more already on 6th September. There is no email or call before disconnecting my internet. I had paid my last bill before the due date so there is no justification for this. As an ISP you cannot cut my internet connection whenever you want without any notice and before even the due date for the payment is passed.

I am still waiting for the resolution for this but I wanted to write about it so that people can read and think and then go for this connection. I am sure a few thousand per month is a lot of money for internet connection in India.

Popularity: 59% [?]

Generally I am not the kinds who write about a product or service on my blog and say bad things about it. But then I have to say this …

The website Shelfari.com is a new service to let people talk about the books that they have read etc and I think that is a great idea. However what sucks is the cheap tricks they pull off to get people to signup. You have an option to import your gmail contacts (like other websites) and in itself nothing bad about it. However it shows you two lists, one below each other. The list on the top is people who are a member of shelfari already (a few) and then a invite button and the list below that is a list of people who are not member of shelfari (a few hundred may be if you use gmail etc that stores all addresses) and an invite button below this list. By default all the contact are checked (shelfari/non-shelfari). Most likely you would never have the strength to uncheck so many (A better behaviour that even linked-in does is to have everything unchecked by default)

Any sensible guy would assume that clicking on the button below shelfari members list would invite them and clicking below the non-shelfari members would invite them. However I clicked the button to connect with friends on shelfari and the invitation went even to members who are not on shelfari (about 600 in my case). Not this is some serious serious SPAM. Also after a few days a ‘gentle reminder’ goes to everyone who has still not joined (They write a disclaimer on the invite page, I later saw that you will never read or misunderstand)

I feel as a web 2.0 company this is some really bad practice …. users are used to certain ways and you should not try to take advantage of them and put little gotchas that work for you …. I just wonder if shelfari can bring in real active users like this to their website .. I am surely never gonna use the site again …

I hope in the near future, Shelfari would take care of that .. Goodluck to them and be careful before you hit invite!

Popularity: 100% [?]