Ortel Communications: A review

You have probably not heard about this company if you are not from Bhubaneswar. I never wanted to write reviews for anything, other than, may be gadgets. But then, I had to mention about this company here. You will soon know why.

It's been more than a month that I have been using this broadband connection at home. When we got an internet connection (a broadband wired connection) at home, there were no other private providers here. Well, the BSNL guys told that a connection to our house wasn't possible at that point in time. Frankly speaking, we didn't have any choice whatsoever. Ortel Communication, had a monopoly everywhere in Orissa. Although, I was very reluctant to give my approval, we hooked onto their network.

Ok. To be frank, this is not a review, rather an outburst after all the torture and frustration I have gone through. So, I would only talk about their negatives here.

• At-least once a day, their modem goes offline. ("loses power"). <<----- That's what they say. And we have to call them every-time to let them know that the poor modem has lost power.
• I had plans of staying at home for sometime, and I would be also working from home for some time. So, I upgraded our connection to a 700kbps plan. I thought it would be enough for my needs. But then I realized that, although the download speed was almost close to 700kbps, the upload speed was pathetic at best (@100kbps). WHAT!!!!
• The day we upgraded our plan, I saw a weird problem. Almost all the pages I opened up, it had an annoying advertisement. I was frustrated, and tried to hunt down the problem. I re-installed my browsers, un-installed all my browser add-ons, but still the problem persisted. After a few more investigations, to my horror, I found that Ortel Communications was injecting this piece of advertisement on each and every page, by intercepting my requests.
• I started writing mails to them on the e-mail addresses provided on their website. Hahaha, I knew what would happen next. 2 out of the 3 recipients mail bounced back. And for the one recipient, I haven't heard back yet. I kept on doing this for 5 days, yet I haven't received even an acknowledgement.
• I did a Google search to find out if anyone else has this problem. Of course, Ortel has it's monopoly in Bhubaneswar.  I found almost everyone was having the same problem.

There is a thread here where you can find more people complaining. You would find a few interesting stories as well.  I had never thought that an ISP would do something like this. When I asked one of the customer care guys about this, they said that they do this because Ortel is providing internet connection in rural areas at a lower cost, and so they had to compensate for it by adopting this. WHAT!!!!! You are awesome Ortel communications. Great going.

By the way, here's the code that they injecting into every website that you visit.  They get their ads onto our webpages by using this script.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ui.streamride.net/ui.js"></script>

This is almost equal to cheating the customers. I don't really care if they are getting some extra revenue. It's just so annoying to see those ads all the time. Here is a sample of how those ads look like on your browsers. This is, in my view, breach of privacy and security and cheating.