From the past few weeks some TelecomTALK team members who use Airtel 4G and 3G services have been facing issues with certain websites when loaded through Airtel 3G / 4G. While we had initially attributed the issue to some network issue such occurrences have only increased and we have also started receiving complaints from our readers. This prompted us to do some thorough testing and document them.
We have tested on Chrome and Firefox browsers on Windows, Ubuntu and Macintosh operating systems in 4G and 3G dongles in Telangana, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
Quora
Logging in to Quora becomes a challenge with Airtel. The login panel appears after few minutes and after logging in the user is often nagged by 'Internet Connection Problem' message. Additionally loading comments is close to impossible. In the below screenshot the comments did not load even after 15 minutes (and comments were only four).
Gmail
One of our readers Sreenivas from Chennai alerted us about this issue. He explained that sending emails became just impossible with Airtel 4G due to the extremely frequent disconnection issues. Sreenivas had already approached Airtel on this issue exactly a month ago on 28 May but Airtel has been closing complaints without any resolution since then.
Wordpress (WP)
Wordpress is our primary platform and majority of issues are with WP. While the domain telecomtalk.info loads fine, submitting comments as a reader is extremely slow. As administrators we are unable to approve comments from our Airtel 3G and 4G connections! The comments show approved but after a page refresh they would still be in pending approval status.
This is how our comments page looks like:
After clicking approve, the page changes to the below state and back to pending approvals page. The 'details' could not be opened at all! We were forced to use other service providers to approve comments many times.
Many times we also get to see the Wordpress Admin page without associated style sheet.
All the above operations take anything more than 30 seconds to few minutes - not expected on high speed connections!
Additional Observations
- Interestingly when all the above issues are observed in the respective browser tabs several other websites (some even data heavy) could be loaded just fine. While we were waiting for the four Quora comments to load, Youtube, facebook, twitter and several other news websites could be opened fine with minor issues. A speedtest on Airtel 4G showed a download speed of over 17 Mbps and upload speed of 8 Mbps which indicates that connections speeds were not to be blamed.
- Just to make sure nothing was wrong with TelecomTALK or Quora or Gmail we disconnected from Airtel 4G multiple times and could successfully perform the same problematic operations on an ACT Fibernet, BSNL and other ISPs without any issues.
- At any point in time we were not notified about disconnection / interruption by the Operating System.
While we were unable to identify the root cause or the point at which issue originates, we expect Airtel to work towards fixing the issue on priority. It is evident that the issue is impacting customers in multiple Airtel circles.
Have you faced any of the issue described in your day to day browsing with an Airtel connection? Please let us know.
Update 30 June 2015, 20:25 hrs IST
Airtel India has informed us that the issue has now been fixed and we have verified the same using our 4G / 3G devices. In case the issue still persists at your end, please try clearing browser cookies and start afresh.
