Is ACT Fibrenet conning us?

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creative420

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I've been with ACT Fibrenet for about 4-5 years in Bengaluru. I was with Airtel earlier on, but I got tired of their routine downtime. And every time I inquired, I would get the reply the line has been cut. We'll fix it. It got worse. Their lines would keep getting cut every now an then. At the same time I started hearing great things about ACT Broadband. Read a few reviews here and there. Their service was decent and stable in Bangalore, I thought 'why not'? So I switched over to ACT. While these guys were installing I very casually, almost jokingly, asked them if they were the ones cutting the airtel lines. And all I got was a mischievous smirk. I had no issues. I just wanted access, a faster access to my share of movies and music, and to play games online.

Jump 4-5 years where every person you know has ACT connection. Everyone is enjoying the awesome speed they provide. But some people are murmuring. And someone writes a petition. Some are posting in their blogs and some of them are writing in the forums. Suddenly, people are running out of FUP by the 2nd or 3rd week. But internet being the bare basic necessity, people keep on resetting the FUP. However, more and more people are complaining about it. Me and my wife work for almost 12 hours everyday and we start getting irked by this. We don't use THAT much of a data, is what we think. But life goes on.

And then I face it. I've reset my FUP about 2-3 times by now, but I think I might be using too much of it. But come August, one announcement by the Supreme Court shivered me and I, on purpose, stopped "accessing" movies and music through some sources online.

On 18th Sept. I get a message saying I've used 80% of the FUP. I tell my wife to stop reduce on the YouTube binge, where she uses 360p video quality. And I thought I'll reduce whatever browsing that I do too. Mind it, after the supreme court ruling, I haven't accessed my source of entertainment. My hard drive hasn't' seen anything new added to it for over a month.

Then it happens. On 24th morning, at around 4am, while I'm playing games, I get a message saying I've exceeded my FUP. I switch of the game and think I'll reset it whenever I wake up. About 11am my wife wakes me up saying she has to do a Skype call with her parents but the internet is very tortoise-y. So I log on and I'm about to reset but I do check under the 'My Usage' header how much of the internet have I really consumed. And it shows that I've used about 35.05GB till 22nd of Sept. I get curious. I could not have used the extra 25GB of data over the next 30 hours. So I give the engineer a call.

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The engineer tells me that I must have definitely exceeded it. I tell him Well, your website is telling me that I've consumed 35.05GB of data. So unless you are getting all this info from some other source/server then show it to me. We disconnect the call as he promises to sort this out in 24 hours. Then after couple of hours I get a call from their engineer asking me to send a screen shot, which I did. All I get in return is a receipt of my email and a promise of fixing this in 72 hours. Meanwhile I also check my usage till 23rd of Sept and I've used just about 35.69GB. Which is less than 80% of my 60GB quota they they said was over by 18th of September.

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I mean, if you're reading this ACT, why are you trying to con us? I mean, you have a good thing going on. If you want extra money, charge us. If it's costing you to expand and pay your employees, we would like to help. Please don't do this. This is as good as adding stones to lentils at ration shops. And we, as Indians, should move away from a mentality like that.

****REMOVED THE RESET ISSUE BIT AFTER SOME MEMBERS CLARIFIED MY MISUNDERSTANDING****
****ALSO, I CHANGED THE THREAD TITLE TO KEEP IT DEBATABLE, RATHER THAN BEING ABSOLUTE****
 
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I have already experienced this at home and my relatives place. The Damn FUP is over by 10-15 of the month. I think the Rs.264 is prorata amount to reset your FUP. But Rs.436 will be restoring full 60 GB which is fair in my opinion. Like in my situation instead of paying 1999+taxes for 100 GB. I have gone for 1049+taxes plan for 50GB at 30Mbps. I send a message for reset of FUP when it's over and I pay 396. In all for 1650, I get 100GB at 30 Mbps which is ok with me.
 
Also, I don't understand how consumption is heavy in my house. I am the sole user and once in a while my father uses youtube, that's it. I have Dlink DIR 850L as my primary router and Asus RT N13U running on DD-WRT as repeater. I hope I find good network FW for DLink router to check the usage statistics.
 
Also, I don't understand how consumption is heavy in my house. I am the sole user and once in a while my father uses youtube, that's it. I have Dlink DIR 850L as my primary router and Asus RT N13U running on DD-WRT as repeater. I hope I find good network FW for DLink router to check the usage statistics.
We had a similar situation at home and the culprit was a HP Omni tablet which was constantly getting updates for windows 10 and other Microsoft products.

Check if auto updates across devices are eating up your data. If your primary router is on dd wrt, then it's easier to find rogue devices hogging the bandwidth.

I use this app across various devices at home to make it easier to monitor live usage details per ip/device.


https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.rm3l.ddwrt
 
Also, realised that UC browser on most phones keep downloading background data. So I have removed UC browser on all phoines in my house and also I ll check if I can disable windows updates on the desktop and laptop for a while.
 
Agreed to all tablets and browsers hogging data, I don't use either of them. The thing is, after the Supreme Court ruling, my downloading has come to zilch. I haven't made any changes to my data usage at all. I just accessed the 3rd season of Silicon Valley on Hotstar that too at 360p. My wife has started using the Sawan Music app off lately. Listening to songs over wifi for 1 hours before our office time. I don't think mp3 streaming consumes so much data. But, the fact is the usage, on their very own site, shows how much data I've consumed. Yet I got a message saying my FUP is 80% complete or full on their respective days.
 
try installing bandwidth/data monitors/loggers on all your devices, at the end of xyz period, add em up and see if it matches their total. note that for bittorrent, uploads will be counted and added to the data by some isps, so make sure to account for that. although you did mention you stopped all downloading...
 
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@creative420 , I too had this problem where my bandwidth was getting exhausted to the tune of 10 GB + per day. I even started blaming my family members. I had cutoff all internet to all the devices except my laptop. Despite these measures I was consuming huge amounts of data. It was only after installing Networx, a bandwidth monitoring tool, on my laptop did I realize that it was the Firefox browser on my laptop that was hogging the bandwidth. As I was not able to isolate the extension that was hogging the bandwidth, I have switched over to Chrome exclusively.

Bottomline, install a bandwidth monitoring software on your devices and check before blaming ACT.
 
@creative420 , I too had this problem where my bandwidth was getting exhausted to the tune of 10 GB + per day. I even started blaming my family members. I had cutoff all internet to all the devices except my laptop. Despite these measures I was consuming huge amounts of data. It was only after installing Networx, a bandwidth monitoring tool, on my laptop did I realize that it was the Firefox browser on my laptop that was hogging the bandwidth. As I was not able to isolate the extension that was hogging the bandwidth, I have switched over to Chrome exclusively.

Bottomline, install a bandwidth monitoring software on your devices and check before blaming ACT.

@skoka123 Now when you type in such BIG RED FONTS, I will definitely check before blaming. But tell me, if you've read my post, did you go through the data usage pictures that I attached? If not, here's the latest one. It's just about 60% of my monthly FUP.

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So what am I supposed to believe. The engineer who called me said the usage should match and the total should be beyond 60GB. But it wasn't. I guessed he probably just called me without looking at it from his end. So I asked him to check it and he figured there's something wrong. I asked him we can go day by day and see if we both have the same figures. We did tally 3 days and it was the same. He then asked me to give him some more time to look into it. I could tell it was very awkward for him. His cockiness evaporated into the thin air.

I'll see what I can do about the bandwidth monitoring software as me and my wife can't really install anything on our office laptops.
 
ACT engineers act as if their software is foolproof and customers are dumb idiots who don't know shit about technology. I posted about my act data problem here. Tl;dr ACT was massively inflating my FUP. Last straw was when I was out of station for 12 days and it showed I downloaded 20gb data even through both router and pc was switched off. Called their nodal team and asked for a call back from technical team.

They called and basically blamed me and said their data was perfect. I asked for data logs (this option was removed from hyd ACT portal for few months for some reason- now its back again) and they sent it. Then I observed that It was showing some other mac address. Somehow someone was using my account from other part of the city. I don't give out act password even to my own sister so there was absolutely no way I could have let the password myself. They then said sorry, some software problem and restored my entire FUP. Took me almost one month to solve this shite.

And this is not an isolated problem. Many users are facing/faced inflated data usage stats here and on other indian tech forums. Wonder how many non tech savvy customers is act scaming daily.
 
Sucks when companies resort to such underhanded tactics to get money from customers. Best option would be to group up and file 100-200 cases in consumer court against the company. This will make headlines really fast.
 
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@skoka123
So what am I supposed to believe. The engineer who called me said the usage should match and the total should be beyond 60GB. But it wasn't. I guessed he probably just called me without looking at it from his end. So I asked him to check it and he figured there's something wrong. I asked him we can go day by day and see if we both have the same figures. We did tally 3 days and it was the same. He then asked me to give him some more time to look into it. I could tell it was very awkward for him. His cockiness evaporated into the thin air.

I'll see what I can do about the bandwidth monitoring software as me and my wife can't really install anything on our office laptops.


The bandwidth usage statistics are not realtime. They take around 24 hrs to update AFAIK. The usage shown in "My Account" section is accurate.

All my data goes through a router that has monitoring capabilities and the data downloaded from the router appears to match ACT's usage.

I would suggest you do actual bandwidth monitoring on your router. There are lots of software updates happening behind your back these days - especially Android/iOS/Windows updates. In addition if you have steam installed to play games, that consumes monstrous amounts of data.
 
Does the usage counter (time duration) keep running even if the desktop/laptop has been switched off -

a) Even if there are no devices like phones/tablets using the connection?

b) While phone/tablets are using the connection?
 
If you're monitoring through router, then yes,it measures data used by other devices.

If on switched off PC, I don't think so.
 
The bandwidth usage statistics are not realtime. They take around 24 hrs to update AFAIK. The usage shown in "My Account" section is accurate.

All my data goes through a router that has monitoring capabilities and the data downloaded from the router appears to match ACT's usage.

I would suggest you do actual bandwidth monitoring on your router. There are lots of software updates happening behind your back these days - especially Android/iOS/Windows updates. In addition if you have steam installed to play games, that consumes monstrous amounts of data.

One thing is very clear. I have just about consumed 60% of my allotted FUP. Yet on 18th I get a message saying I've consumed 80% and on 100% on 24th morning. For me, it's all black and white. I'm only reacting to the data usage shown to me via their website. So real-time or not, I've provided the data usage till 24th of Sept and it shows a real big con.

OT: One thing that really pisses me off is that they are in so many cities now and still don't have a toll-free number. I've wasted about Rs. 60 talking to them over last couple of days. If someone from ACT is reading this, please do something about this.
 
@creative420 , I must admit I did not spend time pouring over your usage data. The point is even I have blamed ACT for inflated usage until it was like a slap on my face when I installed networx. I was hell bent on proving them that they are cheating. I am no friend of ACT. In fact for 4 days of service disruption I made them give me a service credit of Rs. 195. I do keep taking them to task as and when required. Unfortunately, it is a pain getting across their customer care and to top it off it is not toll free.

My suggestion is to install data monitoring software. Once you are sure it is not you who are consuming the data then send a mail to appellate.
 
I have a built-in internet traffic meter in my router, and I sometime verify the usage with the portal data.
They are almost are in sync (+/- 5% may be).
 
@creative420 , I must admit I did not spend time pouring over your usage data. The point is even I have blamed ACT for inflated usage until it was like a slap on my face when I installed networx. I was hell bent on proving them that they are cheating. I am no friend of ACT. In fact for 4 days of service disruption I made them give me a service credit of Rs. 195. I do keep taking them to task as and when required. Unfortunately, it is a pain getting across their customer care and to top it off it is not toll free.

My suggestion is to install data monitoring software. Once you are sure it is not you who are consuming the data then send a mail to appellate.

I'll try finding a way out to install a data monitoring software...

I have a built-in internet traffic meter in my router, and I sometime verify the usage with the portal data.
They are almost are in sync (+/- 5% may be).

...or maybe I can upgrade from my router to the one you have? Which router do you have? I'm anyway thinking of upgrading from my 6 year old TP Link 150N router to a 300 one.
 
One thing is very clear. I have just about consumed 60% of my allotted FUP. Yet on 18th I get a message saying I've consumed 80% and on 100% on 24th morning. For me, it's all black and white. I'm only reacting to the data usage shown to me via their website. So real-time or not, I've provided the data usage till 24th of Sept and it shows a real big con.

OT: One thing that really pisses me off is that they are in so many cities now and still don't have a toll-free number. I've wasted about Rs. 60 talking to them over last couple of days. If someone from ACT is reading this, please do something about this.

You can't really be sure of that. Here's the deal - look at the screen grabs below:

The data consumed page:
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The account page:
jshtmd.png



As you see both are different. The first one doesn't show the data for today and yesterday.

Its quite possible that the data consumption happened in the 2 days that were not recorded in the data consumed page due to some software updates. 20GB is peanuts for these kind of updates.

Personally, 90% of my data usage is netflix, steam and windows/android updates. Web browsing and downloading stuff for coding hardly eats any data.
 
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