Airtel Xstream Fiber Experience (Direct Cities)

rsaeon said:
That's how it was up until around July. Then they came in, ripped everything out, redid the cable management to where now it's not a complete mess:

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Though the cover still doesn't close or lock.



I'm somewhat lucky that my immediate neighbours are wealthy people (one of them had dedicated weekend roadtrip cars back in the 90s, separate from their daily drivers) even though I live very close to a graveyard, a slum area and an open nala.

One of them commissioned Airtel to set up that pole in the photo some years ago at the corner of their house, so on one side I have that. One of the other neighbours has an Excitel distribution box on their property so I have the main home internet connection from there for the last couple of decades (our first plan with Excitel was 64kbps for Rs 500 a month in 2003).

For backup, I have Jio's 4G dongle, this is used for home automation during power cuts so that nothing breaks. (I was in the process of transitioning away from eWeLink to a purely self-hosted setup but a reddit post caused to me to stop and rethink it all and I still haven't figured it out — who would maintain the home automation system if I were to die? I need a solution that would work just as reliably as the physical switch so that if it were to go bad and I'm not around, it's only a matter of replacing the smart switch with a regular switch to get things working again. But that's an entirely different discussion).
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For me the black optic cable comes till home and then split/spliced to that yellow cable. Whatever outside that is fixed to the tree is just a black thin box.

You mean to say you are sharing/hacking your wealthy neighbours' wifi or just using dongle for backup?
I never thought of owning a 4g dongle bcz nowadays speed is way less. My office gave an airtel dongle and it's crap. Maybe 5g dongles can save the day if cheaper.
 
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Ssreek said:
For me the black optic cable comes till home and then split/spliced to that yellow cable.
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The same thing is done at the other end dude... See all those green ends? Each is an individual's connection.
This is what I was talking about. If this box is at capacity they just disconnect someone's cable and connect the new customer's cable.

Complain, fix, complain, fix and the cycle keeps repeating until they get the capacity extended or install a new box nearby.
 
enthusiast29 said:
The same thing is done at the other end dude... See all those green ends? Each is an individual's connection.
This is what I was talking about. If this box is at capacity they just disconnect someone's cable and connect the new customer's cable.

Complain, fix, complain, fix and the cycle keeps repeating until they get the capacity extended or install a new box nearby.
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Our side that box near the tree looks like this.

So you are saying the technicians get incentives to fix things and not like regular salary?
 
BullettuPaandi said:
Wait, so the thick black fiber cable is not individually run to houses?
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They are, that's the armored/reinforced/outdoor-rated black cables coming in on the left and then spliced with the yellow cables that are plugged into the splitter. It's set up like this:

_1594969372_NNa2RScfG4.png

community.fs.com

What Is PLC Splitter and How Does it Works? | FS Community

PLC splitter, or the Planar Waveguide Circuit splitter, is a passive device to divide one or two optical signals to multiple signals uniformly or combine multiple signals to one or two optical signals. It's often used in PON (EPON, GPON, BPON, FTTX) networks.
community.fs.com community.fs.com

This box represents the middle two parts of that chain.

Ssreek said:
You mean to say you are sharing/hacking your wealthy neighbours' wifi or just using dongle?
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No, neither — two of my neighbours paid for distribution points to be set up for two different ISPs so I'm lucky that I have the choice of multiple ISPs and that my connections those ISPs uses very short cable runs (under 50 meters), so they're both pretty reliable or easy to repair.

However, Excitel's connection does not work when there's a power outage, and the Airtel box occasionally goes down when someone crashes into the pole (it's on a street corner) so in the off chance that both of those events occur, I have a Jio 4G dongle as a backup internet connection.

That's happened only once in the last three years though.
 
enthusiast29 said:
The same thing is done at the other end dude
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Okay, so am I understanding this correctly now? -

BullettuPaandi said:
only the yellow patch cord is run into houses from there?
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BullettuPaandi said:
But must be using only the more rugged black cable.
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BullettuPaandi said:
and I'm assuming they're doing as in the image (only) for apartments
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these assumptions were wrong. For some odd reason, I assumed the left part of the image is the input side; It's the output side!

Still, is it okay to have such exposed wiring as in the image? In my end the spliced and exposed parts sit in this
Ssreek said:
this
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box. So, is it just avoid me being dumb with it?
 
enthusiast29 said:
It's a fiber cable. Very delicate and can be broken very easily so any joints in-between either at your home or outside are out inside such covers securely to protect them.
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I understand that, what I'm asking is - is it all-okay as long as it's in a box? For instance look at the top right of the image; looks like the fiber cable is bent over 145 degrees and is hanging on itself!
 
So here's an update.

  • Issue got resolved yesterday, the service guy came did something near the tree box for few minutes, said wire got cut/crack. He's too uninterested for this job, probably less salary like someone pointed out.
  • Got call from 2 of their customer service guys and assured that disconnections won't happen and will be resolved asap from now on.
And now internet got disconnected again since last night. :banghead::banghead: :banghead:

I hate to move to jio or act, but that seems to be the alternative.
 
Ssreek said:
So here's an update.

  • Issue got resolved yesterday, the service guy came did something near the tree box for few minutes, said wire got cut/crack. He's too uninterested for this job, probably less salary like someone pointed out.
  • Got call from 2 of their customer service guys and assured that disconnections won't happen and will be resolved asap from now on.
And now internet got disconnected again since last night. :banghead::banghead: :banghead:

I hate to move to jio or act, but that seems to be the alternative.
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Is your connection lco provided or direct from airtel? I think it's really unusual to have that many issues.

I'd try escalating it first before changing providers.
 
calvin1719 said:
Is your connection lco provided or direct from airtel? I think it's really unusual to have that many issues.

I'd try escalating it first before changing providers.
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Direct from airtel.

Bro I even launched grievance in consumer nch and they assured it won't happen again. Don't know what else I can do.
 
calvin1719 said:
Maybe try raising it through their appellate system? https://www.airtel.in/broadband-appellate
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Done this already.
These are the emails I've contacted:

121@in.airtel.com, Net@airtel.com, appellate.andhra@airtel.com, appellate.southabts@in.airtel.com

Let me know if there's any higher authority I need to contact.

Now I am guessing there could be another reason though. I am the only one in my apartment building to use airtel. Adjacent building seems to have 3. All those other 80+ flats use Jio.
Maybe our area is least preference for the company.
 
Ssreek said:
Done this already.
These are the emails I've contacted:

121@in.airtel.com, Net@airtel.com, appellate.andhra@airtel.com, appellate.southabts@in.airtel.com

Let me know if there's any higher authority I need to contact.

Now I am guessing there could be another reason though. I am the only one in my apartment building to use airtel. Adjacent building seems to have 3. All those other 80+ flats use Jio.
Maybe our area is least preference for the company.
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Well that's rather unfortunate then.
 
Ssreek said:
Now I am guessing there could be another reason though. I am the only one in my apartment building to use airtel. Adjacent building seems to have 3. All those other 80+ flats use Jio.
Maybe our area is least preference for the company.
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Sometimes competitor ISP employees like to cut wires of other ISPs to trouble customers and force them into switching to them instead.
 
enthusiast29 said:
Sometimes competitor ISP employees like to cut wires of other ISPs to trouble customers and force them into switching to them instead.
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This is what happened during that 4 day outage, except it wasn't malicious, multiple ISPs and Cable TV providers were fighting over the same pole, even though it was a pole installed by Airtel. Once the Airtel people clarified this, the other people moved their wires to an old BSNL pole.

I would have thought there's some kind of pole sharing agreement between all of these companies but apparently not.
 
Pretty bad, they've recently starting doing some kind of DPI and wildcard DNS blocking and their efforts are amateuristic at best so the internet is broken a lot of the time — and the bandwidth is overprovisioned so speeds drop to under 20Mbps in the evenings.

The only reason why I'm sticking with them is because twenty years ago I changed my DHCP lease to a random static IP on their network and this unlocked the full bandwidth of their leased line. I did this late at night so it went unnoticed for years. During this time, I proceeded to torrent hundreds of gigabytes of data at ~5Mbps while I was paying for a 64kbps connection.

So I kind of feel bad about that, and decided to continue paying for a connection with this ISP as long as they're in business.
 
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