Dear airtel, Google is now an ISP and you can learn a lot from them


Airtel recently made news when a senior management guy made an interesting statement in the media.

Airtel basically wants revenue from online services like Google and Facebook for delivering their product to the end user in the Indian market.

The company said that the kind of investments they are making on expanding their network, they are getting nothing from these online services. Google (YouTube) and Facebook are two of the most popular online services in India.

Well, Google has just become an ISP in the US market with the launch of Google Fiber and airtel can surely learn a thing or two from them.

Google is offering no limit plans through fiber. Top end plan comes with television services as well. Google is also bundling freebies like Nexus 7 Tablet and 1TB storage on Google Drive on the top end plan.

You can essentially get gigabit internet for USD 70 per month. No limits. That comes to around Rs. 3890.

If this is not impressive enough, Google is also offering a free 5mbps no limits plan. Customer just has to pay a one-time fee of USD 300 for the installation and infrastructure.

There are no fair usage policies. There are probably going to be no throttling of traffic on certain services like torrents. There are no premium charges for buying additional bandwidth.

This is how you provide internet access to the common people. Do not treat it like a luxury item… Treat it like an enabling tool. Respect your customers and they would respect you back.

  • saptarshi

    I think it is blasphemy to utter Airtel and Google in the same sentence. Airtel is an evil bloodsucking corporate and Google is the nicest company in history.

    • http://sushubh.net/ OperaManiac

      saptarshi lol. airtel started it all when they targeted google along with facebook. :) i just had to do this post! 

  • bobby

    yeah ..awesome plans. Lets hope google expands to different cities as well. But isn’t this just experiment for google? They’re just providing access for one city at present. Do they have plans to expand to other cities and become an full fledged ISP?

    • http://sushubh.net/ OperaManiac

      @bobby of course, it is an experimentation. my point here was just that airtel as an isp cannot do what they are supposed to do and they compared themselves with google and facebook. airtel of course does not even have a mobile app that i can use to manage my various accounts. they are still living in dark ages when it comes to technology. 

  • saptarshi

    This is a pilot phase for what is going to be expanded to other cities.

    • http://sushubh.net/ OperaManiac

      saptarshi I do not see Google expanding it nationwide. Maybe a few other cities. Investments are massive and they are not really charging enough to recover much. It is a loss making experiment for the company. Probably to put pressure on other players in the market. Once the consumers see that 1gbps speeds are possible for 100 dollars per month with no fair usage policy, it becomes tough for the bigger players to continue with their atrocious plans.