ACZoom  ·  Archive-2016

2012 July update: After months of not using Reliance, I tried it again for a few times this month and it seemed to work fine for a couple of times. But then, it failed again - after 5 minutes into the call, the audio got cut-off, but the connection was still alive. So this is still not usable, all that has changed is it takes longer for the audio to cut out.

Starting in the middle of 2011, the calling card from Reliance GlobalCall has been a disaster to use. Every time I connect from the US to some number in India using their local access numbers, the audio abruptly cuts out. And there is just silence on the call at my end, and lot of static at the other end. This happens anywhere from 10 seconds to 2 minutes into the call. At peak times on weekends it is really bad and cuts off in under 10-30 seconds.

For years, using Reliance to call India from US worked fine. Starting sometime in 2011, it has been touch-and-go, most of the time the conversation gets cut off even though the line is still connected.

Most of the "customer support" email submissions on this issue never received any response from Reliance. But finally after many email reports, they contacted me to try to fix the problem. No luck - I spent so much time on this issue, including having them monitor the call multiple times (10+ times) while I dialed the number, but to no avail. Their engineers could find nothing wrong - I am not sure that they really had any senior engineers help out here, even though this issue has dragged on for months. But they anyway went ahead and always said "we fixed it" even when they never really fixed anything - the next call I made would cut out in the same manner. With some more testing, though limited, it seems that the local access numbers show this problem - local access numbers from NJ, MA, CA - all failed. But the 1-800 access number did not fail in this manner. It is difficult to reproduce this problem when they are on the line, and when it did happen - they said it was not a connectivity problem so they marked it fixed! After the next failure, they said "Call Quality" was not the issue, so it was a connectivity problem. So it just moved from one category to another, and even though the failure was seen when they were tracking it, the problem was not fixed. It probably also has to do with peak-time calling (when I wanted to call) and off-peak calling (when the test monitoring was done).

So I now have a calling card that is basically dead and unusable.

Other calling cards work just fine: I had a backup card Tata trueroots which worked just fine. And now there is also Google Voice which also works without any audio cutting out or dropped call issues. Both these options are much better than Reliance in terms of call quality and connectivity, the Reliance card is just not worth it.

Of course, I should point out that there are not too many people complaining about problems with Reliance.
All I can say is that for when I use my phone to call a specific number in India, Tata TrueRoots, Google Voice both work fine, but using Reliance for same phone call setup fails quite often - 50% or so failure rate.

Prices are much better with the Google Voice product and their rates are much simpler and easier to understand than the numerous plans and options with both the Tata and Reliance products.
As for customer service, I suspect all three of these have extremely poor service - so the point is to find something that will just work, and avoid the problem calling cards.