Reliance Netconnect Mobile Broadband in India

by Vivek
(Silvassa)

The Reliance mobile broadband service, marketed by the name of “Reliance Netconnect” is the one I want to review today. Reliance offers its services on a CDMA network that spans across the country. A onetime fee of 2299 Rs is required for the purchase of the connection and the bundled USB modem. I have firsthand experience with this service. The regular interactions give me a pretty good idea about the quality of service that Reliance offers to its customers.



I had opted for one of their wireless broadband plans that were charged at 499 Rs per month and provided 10 GB of free (night) usage. It promises a maximum speed of 3.1 Mbps, but the actual speed I got was about 512 Kbps and about 1 Mbps during the off-peak time (22:00 to 6:00), which again is quite fast when compared to Indian standards. On a side note: Reliance guarantees a minimum speed of 256 Kbps.



Since I required a decently fast internet connection just to reduce loading time of certain flash based pages, I was satisfied with the speed I got. After a few months of relatively good performance there were a few hitches but they were resolved overall. As I have said earlier, Reliance has a nationwide coverage of the CDMA network and so connectivity is not an issue here. I usually shift between my home town and to my native place that is about 100 miles from where I live. I am yet to see a connectivity issue in this regard.



The only problems/issues that I have ever faced are with the customer care department. For a few days my device simply refused to connect to the internet. I called the customer care agent who said that a technician would contact me within 24 hrs. Well that call never came and so after 3 days of waiting and tweaking my OS settings I finally decided to re-install my OS from scratch. Surprisingly, the connection started working again.



Overall Reliance delivers good service and performance (at least to me), but their customer care department needs a lot of improvement.