Home Calling Card Service: Reliance India Call Versus Airtel Call

Airtel (a unit of Bharati Telecom, big reputed cell phone company in India) recently has introduced the calling service to India, called 'Airtel Call Home'. Reliance is already having the same service available in US since long back. The name of Reliance offered service to call in India is called 'Reliance India call'. Reliance calling card is very popular among Indian NRIs (Non-Resident Indian) until recently. Both calling card has few advantage and disadvantages. The introduction of Airtel calling card was noticeable. They come with lots of good offers and prices. Overall service of Airtel may not be good. We will compare both these services side by side.

Reliance India Call Vs. Airtel Call Home # 1: Price - Airtel Call Home is offering the telephone service with 7.9 cents per minutes to call any number (mobile or landline) in India from US; Whereas Reliance India Call service costs 12.9 cents per minutes for this same service. Price wise Airtel is little ahead of Reliance.

Reliance India Call Vs. Airtel Call Home # 2: Voice Quality - Both of these services are using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology for their service. When it comes to VoIP everyone (service providers) are using the same network to transfer the voice packets. So the voice quality is more or less same for all the service providers. Voice quality may vary depending upon the broadband connection the customer is having. I found both of these services (Reliance and Airtel) are good in voice quality.

Reliance India Call Vs. Airtel Call Home # 3: Toll-Free Number Access - Each of these service providers are having toll-free number. You have to call to that number first and once you valid your account credentials you need to dial your home country telephone number. Reliance has very good service as per this toll-free dialing number is concern. I never had any issue for connecting to this number for Reliance, but for Airtel this is a real pain. Several times I tried to connect to this toll-free number, but it didn't work out in one or two chances. Especially during weekend it is very difficult to connect to this toll-free number in case of Airtel. Sometimes we get busy tone for this toll-free number of Airtel. If you have any emergency and want to call your relatives who are there in India, you may not able to do that due to this issue with Airtel toll-free number. Airtel needs to improve this toll-free number service a lot. Reliance is far better in this respect.

Reliance India Call Vs. Airtel Call Home # 4: Website and Web Account - Reliance has really good website and web account services. I never faced any problem with Reliance website and my web account. You can recharge your card instantly through Reliance website. You will be able to get the information regarding offers available for Reliance from their website. In case of Airtel, the website is the poorest one I ever seen. Many folks like me faced problem during initial sign-up. The website is very slow and 60 percent cases the website will be down. I never ever able to complete my one transaction at a single shot for Airtel. Airtel site is using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) inside the website, which will put you completely in dark about the progress of your request. You won't be able to see the progress of your transaction from the status bar of the page, so there are no hints of what is happening after you submit the transaction. The message displayed on the website is very poor and insufficient to get idea about the process and status.

Reliance India Call Vs. Airtel Call Home # 5: Speed-Dial Feature - Reliance website is providing a very good speed dialing feature. You can store the lengthy numbers in a short form of two digits, which is easy to remember for you. During dialing you can just dial that two digit number to call. Reliance will internally convert that two digit number to the actual number. This is a great feature or Reliance, when you are using a telephone number with STD code (same as area code in US, but may be three to six digits long). You don't need to remember the whole number for dialing. Airtel doesn't provide this service, which made Airtel service little difficult.

Reliance India Call Vs. Airtel Call Home # 6: Redial Facility - Suppose, the phone number you are calling is busy, you can still able to dial another number within your same call established with Airtel Call Home service. In case of Reliance India Call if your dialing number is busy you have no other choices except disconnecting the current call with Reliance and dial the toll-free number again to connect to another number. This is a major disadvantage of Reliance India Call service.

Reliance India Call Vs. Airtel Call Home # 7: Offers and Deals - As an introductory offer, Airtel Call Home offered double talk time on sing-up and first recharge. Again during any festival in India Airtel is offering almost similar kind of offer regularly. If someone takes the advantage of this offer they can gain a lot. Reliance also started few deals but those are not as interesting as Airtel.

Reliance India Call Vs. Airtel Call Home # 8: Customer Service - From my personal experience I saw the customer service is little better for Reliance than Airtel Call Home service. Again here also the waiting time for Airtel is very long. Customer service representatives are friendly for Airtel, For Reliance I realized that their customer service representatives are sometimes not completely aware about the different offers and rules. One time I contacted Reliance regarding few call charges and they gave me the charge back to my account for those doubtful charges.