Airtel's Double Speed for Unlimited Plans

For the last two months, Airtel has been offering a special plan to "selected" subscribers. Pay Rupees 100 more, to double your connection speed. This offer has been communicated to their existing subscribers by e-mail and direct calls. This offer is valid on selected plans - those offered to home users of DSL Internet with unlimited-usage only.

It started with only some people in the metros being offered the special scheme, but now it seems to be available across the whole of India, in any place where Airtel offers fixed landline services. We do not claim to have got all possible details below, Airtel might still change its policies at any time. With more and more people being offered with this plan, PC World decided to jump in and investigate the details. What we found out is in the tables below.

The juicy plans:

The juicy plans after applying the Rs. 100 top-up:

There are some casualties, in the form of subscribers to some plans who will not be able to take advantage of the double-speed offer. Listed below are the unfortunate special-case plans who lose out:

Some notes:
1. Obviously, if Airtel serves your area that is a good thing!
2. This Rs. 100 top-up does not only double the download speed, it also counts as a discount for 100 Rupees’ worth of talktime from your landline with no conditions attached.
3. As you’d know by now, Airtel uses a concept of “Fair Usage Policy” and will reduce your connection speed once you go over the FUP data-transfer limit for the rest of the month, and restore you to full speed after the month ends.
4. None of the plans mentioned above offer or cut-down speed to below 256 Kbps because TRAI has mandated that the minimum speed to qualify for the term “broadband” is 256 Kbps.

Important Links:
1. Airtel coverage
2. An Indian forum discussion of the Rs. 100 double-speed offer
3. Airtel Fair Usage Policy document in PDF form
4. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) homepage

We personally experienced an upgraded connection at home for 45 days to bring you confirmed and complete news. Here’s what we think needs to be highlighted:
1. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that the higher-priced plans incur significant tax – so you end up paying Rs. 2000 for the 1699 plan.
2. In the case of the 1699 plan atleast, the “speed upgrade” is downstream only, so your upload speeds remain the same as earlier. If you use private trackers and torrents, it is going to be that much harder for you to maintain an acceptable ratio of 1:1 when your download speed far exceeds upload.
3. After our download speed went from 1 Mbps to 2 Mbps, the lost bandwidth due to network overheads became that much more obvious. Two Megabits/second is supposed to fetch 256 KiloBytes/second (Note the small “b” to denote bits and capital “B” to denote Bytes). But the actual downstream speed ranged between 168 KBps to a maximum of just 235 KBps, sometimes dipping to 90 KBps..
4. Here's the most important bit. Paying this extra Rs. 100 acts as a form of insurance against your speed being reduced under an umbrella reason of "FUP". It is definitely nice when after having doubled your speed, you will never suffer a speed of anything less than the original speed you signed up for, since even if Airtel halves your speed you will still fall-back only to the original speed of your Internet connection's plan.

If you are thinking of taking up an Airtel internet connection, here’s what you need to know:
1. You need to pay a one-time installation fee of Rs. 1000 which will be added to your first bill.
2. Airtel offers a modem free without any monthly rental attached. But if you require high-reliability, consider asking Airtel to send you a high-end ZyXEL modem instead, which is also much more configurable, costs Rs. 2500 and is worth it. You can re-use the modem with any other DSL provider (like BSNL), since they all use the ADSL2+ standard.
3. If you have one or more laptops in the house, Airtel will offer a modem+WiFi router at a cost of Rs. 1500 but you are probably better off using their free modem and buying a decent branded WiFi router yourself.

Now we get to the part where we wonder aloud “what is in it for Airtel”? Giving double speeds at such low incremental cost is not for altruistic purposes, to benefit you the customer. It is surely a business decision made with some calculations in mind. Maybe Airtel is gearing up to make 512 Kbps the minimum speed for broadband internet access in India. Maybe the extra Rs. 100 is expected to assure an increase of call volumes riding on the back of the “discount” provided. Perhaps they are trying to see how their back-end copes with increased data traffic, by selectively offering double-speeds and leveraging it to get higher ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) from at least a few customers. The arrival of this kind of special offers to "select" customers in the past 6 years has usually led to better-priced plans that are open to everyone after a few months. We could even take the cynical view and suggest that since India has 18.6 Tbps worth of optical-fibre cables laid by ILD gateways connecting it to the world and less than 1 Tbps is actually being used at present, Airtel is trying to use more of the idle (and thus unprofitable anyway) capacity.