Reliance Global Call - Drops Calls

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.

Comments

Call Drop Issue

Dear Avinash,

Kindly provide the details of your complaint along with your contact number and location.
We will try our best to resolve your issue at the earliest.

You can also register your complaint on our website at
https://www.relianceglobalcall.com/contact_us.aspx
or on Reliance Global Call Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/RelianceGlobalCall/app_212043932230487

Regards,
Reliance Global Call Response Team

Still same status

So in July 2012 Reliance made another effort to fix this problem.

They did try to setup call traces and pull in a bunch of people to try to fix this - but the same thing happened. When I made the calls, 1 out of 2 dropped after 1 minute. But their engineers could not use the logs of the calls even though I provided the time of call. They needed to see it fail while they were tracing it - and when they did that, it did not fail in the two tries we attempted. It did fail when they were watching back in late 2011. but hey were unable to figure out the issue.

So the classic software problem - the logs do not contain enough information for them to fix it, and it is not easily reproducible when they watch it. Certainly one difference is that we have done the tracing only at low load periods during the week while all the drops I've experienced happened on Sat/Sun calls which is likely peak calling time from US to India.

Hi Avinash, It looks great

Hi Avinash,

It looks great that Reliance Team is taking an effort to help you out....But there are others telecom brand who are least bothered even to take an initiative to help the customers!!!!!

Reliance is great!!!!!!

It is a poor quality product

Well, even after their tests, which involved a number of experiments where I had to spend a lot of time making test calls, the failure has not been fixed. A month after these tests, I tried again. It has failed twice now, when making calls at peak times like Sat / Sun 11:30AM New York time. And they no longer even respond to email messages telling them about their problems, so they have gone back to the old behavior of ignoring reports. Which is fine - for such low cost of the card, I don't think they can provide too much support.

But the fact remains that other calling cards work fine while Reliance cuts off in the middle of a call.

So, this Reliance card is basically unreliable.

worst and best fraud

Dear Reliance User,

My wise advise is to shift to another network and they are very good service provider like Airtel, vodafone etc but this reliance is worst and even they dont care customer's problem and they are better at fraud.
I have faced worst with reliance call drops since a week and I lost several Interview calls and I had requested by mail and skype.

My best advice is silence shift to another network.

Regards
DG

Reliance Call Service is unreliabile

Like clockwork, my calls get dropped after a few minutes....doesn't matter whether its peak or non-peak hours. Something is fundamentally wrong with Reliance's network which they haven't been able to sort out. I've been with them since 2006 but the time has come to let go. So long Reliance, moving on to Tata TrueRoots...