Airtel Mobile & Broadband Draws Fire on Twitter

Could Airtel's operations be experiencing a big squeeze in finances? Their mobile and broadband services have been experiencing a lot of trouble since a while before and after their big international foray. The Indian telecom operator had acquired a stake in South African operator Zain Telecom recently. Considering the wave of problems they have been facing, this might indicate pressure on Airtel to cut down expenses on other counts.

Airtel's Mobile service network has had outages (one just yesterday in Bangalore), Airtel’s Landline services seems to be stopping paper bills in favour of e-bills instead, and Airtel Broadband has been implementing a "Fair Usage Policy" (FUP) possibly to reduce bandwidth usage on unlimited Internet connections.

Coming from Airtel, a company that until recently was known to represent quality services in India, this is quite a fall in the user’s eyes. Inevitably, users of the company's services are annoyed and are looking for ways to solve the issues since calling customer service cannot change company policies. Most of the affected users can be seen complaining online on forums, and Twitter where they can communicate with other users and respond to each other’s queries.

This is where it gets funny. A particularly annoyed user seems to have decided to give back as good as he (or she) gets. Starting a Twitter account by the name of AirtelPR (a parody of Airtel, like BPGlobalPR), this user has been tweeting sarcasm and mockery of a most bitingly humorous nature. Amused by this, a lot of users have been following the account, communicating and re-tweeting this user.

Airtel does have an official account on Twitter by the name of airtel_presence but most of their tweets seem to be attempting damage control by asking users to send details of the user's problems by e-mail to their address. We can only hope those users did receive a solution. However that still leaves the small issue of Airtel's FUP, a policy that still has a lot of users fuming.