There are so many Internet service providers (ISPs) in Nepal, only a few of them gives very reliable services. Most ISPs deceive their customers and apply various rules to get financial benefits.
We would like to share our experience with one of the service providers. What we felt very disappointing was the way they sold their packages. Their marketing department is told different details about the packages than their technical department. This ISP sells dedicated connection to businesses which is never reliable enough for being called as dedicated. When customers call to complaining about speed, the technical staff requests us to install any desk application and using this app technical staff, resets wifi password and visit youtube to show that the speed is not slow which sometimes is really not as promised in the installed service pack.
Some more pressing problems faced by customers
Resetting internet service before 30 days: Some ISPs in Nepal reset the recharge on the day of buying the connection, every month even if the recharge was done 14-15 days before that day. This forces customers to abandon the monthly recharge option and switch to annual.
Charging customers for changing the plans: Some ISPs in Nepal charge customers for changing the plan. This tactic usually stops the customers from degrading the package to lower bandwidth or at least make them think twice about changing the plan, which is ridiculously frustrating.
Deceiving customers about the plan: This is caused generally due to miss-communication about the packages or is it? When the customer commits for a package, he loses a handful of money, but what the customer gets in return is false hope that the service would be worth it.
Charging customers for cable wire: ISPs are companies which use their network to deliver internet services. For them, cable wire is not costly enough to charge them separately. Single customer commits to pay more than 12k a year, but no they want to charge for cable separately to get more turnover per year.
Providing lower speeds: Most of the household connections are shared, which means if more are browsing at the same time, then the internet will be slow. But how could the dedicated connection be slower than the assigned bandwidth? Is it really dedicated connection or it is just same old shared internet under the hood.
Very frequent link breakage between the cities: The average lifespan of optical wire is more than 10 years. But the link between cities breaks at least once a month. Some ISPs are quick to resolve the issue but the fact that the link breaks so frequently definitely shows there is something terribly wrong with the way the wires are linked and maintained.
No proper customer services: Only a few of the ISPs provide customer care contact number, an online portal to get details about the status of service and updates about maintenance etc.
No refund option: There are times when customers feel being deceived by ISP but by that time they pay for a year of the subscription in case customers are unhappy with service. Without refund option, customers are bound to an unhappy relationship with ISP.
Customers in Nepal aren’t well informed to understand the tactics used by ISPs. Maybe customers in Nepal don’t have any other option but to face these problems because there is no other better ISP is in Nepal.
