Says who? The person who says so seriously hasn’t been to India. Or maybe he just never had to deal with Exatt (read: evil ISP). These guys are the bane of my existence. If it weren’t for them, life would seriously be a lot easier. I have 7 points to this post.

1) The guys at Exatt can read minds
No other way to explain it. Got to submit an important project? Need to do some research for a subject? Need to write an assignment? Want to learn something? Got a customer/competition deadline to meet? Want to audio chat with a family member?
If any of these are true for you, you can guarantee Exatt will be down. 9/10 if you have something important to do, they seem to be down. You could say its bad luck if it happens a few times but when it happens for 4 straight years, you know something is fucked.

2) They can redefine what ping stats are supposed to be!
Here is my current ping stats to google.
Ping statistics for 64.233.167.99:
Packets: Sent = 592, Received = 139, Lost = 453 (76% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 300ms, Maximum = 320ms, Average = 303ms
In case you’re wondering how I’m here, its because I am typing this out in scite now. May be when Exatt deems I haven’t got anything important to do on the internet (refer #1) it will allow me to come online.

3) They redefine reconnectivity.
Want to download a 100MB file? You’d better have wget or some download manager. If you don’t and you’re on Exatt, you are not going to get the file. Its so bad right now that any file over 1.5 MB needs to be wgetted by me. Isn’t that nice?
Also my PC is on 24×7. I have auto redialing set to 3 seconds for when my internet dies. So technically, my connect time should be (30 days in seconds*0.9999)-(0.0001*30 days in seconds*3)=719.712 hours where 0.9999 represents the 99.99% uptime that ISPs should give, right?
I don’t think I’ve ever reached the 500 hour mark or the 400 one for that matter. The best I’ve done is 380 hours in the 4 and a half years. 52.78% uptime is total ownage, ain’t it?
Anyone who has been to my place has seen Exatt take 10 minutes to open a page and at times even google takes a minute to open.
Now you know why checking my mail in it self a huge venture.

4) Awesomely flexible bandwidth caps.
They are capable of pushing you from one plan to the other with no prior notice. I am pretty sure there is some customer law which mandates we get notice and we give our consent before changing what we subscribe for. Clearly, they haven’t heard of such a thing.

5) Support
What the fuck is that?
If I tell them exactly what’s wrong and even where in the network the problem lies they still take 2-3 days to fix it. I wouldn’t be so pissed if their nearest office was 10 kms away. The fuckers live 150 feet away. I can actually see their office from my place
And I thought I was a procrastinator. I don’t even get paid for my work..
Try not having an internet connection for 5 days. Thats the time it took them to figure out what’s wrong. FYI, it was a switch that needed resetting. Something I told them 3 mins after my net died.

6) Redefining computer standards.
Theory: 64 kbps actually means 64 kilobits per seconds and since one kilobit is 8 kilobytes, you are supposed to get 8 KBps (The speed you see on screen).

Practical: Now your line can have losses so if you’re very far away from the Internet backbone, you could have speed drops of upto 2-3% quite easily. Seems logical enough for you, doesn’t it?

Fact: I live in Mumbai. The internet backbone for India connecting us to the UK passes through my city. Its less than 10 km away from the place.
The speed I get on my “64 kbps” connection is 5 KB/s. Its more like 5.5 when I’m having a good day and touches 6 KB/s intermittently if the internet gods are on my side.
30% of the time, I have 40-45% losses. On good days, I have 10% packet losses.

Their excuses: Technician #1) In the monsoon, water on the cat5s (which are atop buildings) causes drops.
Technician #2) 5 kbps is the expected speed for a 64 kbps connection.
Technician #3) I can’t do anything about the losses. Its the ISPs problem.

My answers: #1) Really? Well… has it been raining for 6 months straight? The wires would slag more in the summer because of heat so I should expect more losses then?
#2) REALLY? Wow.. No idea why I’m paying Mumbai University 35k INR a year for my education I should just come to you. Those guys told me 1 byte was 8 bits. I guess your relation of 1 byte to 12.8 bits should be more accurate. You do have practical proof on your side!
I guess every single book I read was wrong Damn it.. Serves me right for reading such technical books
#3) Kindly explain the 0% loss in your office when I stay 3 buildings away. There’s 1 switch in between. Go figure.
And yes, I was really in your office testing pings from your desktop.

At least all 3 technicians had one thing in common. None of them said anything in reply. Its no surprise that they don’t answer my calls anymore or make excuses when I call. The first year, I didn’t mind it because they said “they’re just setting things up”. The second year, I optimistically waited. The 3rd, I went into denial and ignored it. The 4th, I’m bitching and ranting in.

7) Because they are security holes the size of Texas.
If a site tries to check what my IP is, it gets 202.63.167.131. Try going there.
You’d see that’s an Exatt site for checking our usage stats. You know what’s interesting. I reported this a month back and it still hasn’t been fixed. There’s nothing to fix tbh. They’re obviously doing it themselves. This way they can filter stats. Its like a proxy.. not a pretty good one considering we would be in a 5 km radius.
Why do I have a problem with this? Because all my data is going via their computer. For all I know, they could be screening it. If someone gets control of that terminal, it wouldn’t take them more than a matter of minutes to add filters to read usernames, passwords, emails, credit card numbers, emails and even chat logs. (Sure, essential things are usually encrypted first but that’s not the point). For all we know, they could be taking stats of what sites we are visiting. What we download. What we view.
Invasion of privacy? Security threat? You name it and you could could probably do those things with data like that. And this is for at least an area with a few thousand connections on one server (the one I’m on).

And oh, I am not even allowed to transfer files to a friend across a private network. They have restricted LAN access. That means no multiplayer game plays. They had started the service on a private network but now they’re charging for it. They don’t provide a server for it.. just the line. We host the games. We call each other to inform each other about the ips. We have already paid them for the line and bandwidth over the internet. They don’t need to pay anyone for private network usage of bandwidth. Why charge us? Theives is what I say. While a friend told me today he is getting 1MB/s over the internet, I was left wondering as to why I don’t get such speeds even over LAN.

No, I don’t have an option to change ISPs. I am going to probably move to a new ISP (not by my choice) soon but either way, they’re on the same network. Same root source. Same servers. So the same issues, I presume. Lets hope things change If I don’t see change in 5 years, I’d stop calling India an IT nation.
There’s no point saying this but its about time someone said it. The point behind this was that I wanted to put this up on India Broadband forums, a place I look up for ISPs and believe everyone else should too. This is just so that others should know how bad Exatt is.. May google help me in this quest
I have never seen a streamed video in my life. I’ve never been on youtube and I waited 28 days and 5 hours for Visual Studio 2008. Now you know how great Exatt is.

By the end of the post, the stats had moved on to..
Ping statistics for 64.233.167.99:
Packets: Sent = 2227, Received = 225, Lost = 2002 (89% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 299ms, Maximum = 329ms, Average = 303ms
rofl.
This post was written at midnight and posted 18 hours later when they finally got my connection started. Problem? The switch again. You think they’d learn after 3 years..

Update: FYI here’s a link to the thread on India Broadband forums.

Tags: exatt, internet, rant