January 19, 2007 · This post currently has 27 comments
Enjoy Airtel Broadband now with unlimited download limits and speeds more than 512kbps.
And I mean FREE as in “Freedom”.
The other day while aimlessly surfing the web, I came across a forum which discussed about Airtel Broadband Services. It contained a topic by a user in which he asks
i know that the login name is my phone number itself… but is my adsl link really identified as my number?
suppose…. i’ve been using a lot of NCR high speed accounts lately….
but have never heard from airtel… can they really trace me..
It was pretty interesting to read the follow up posts, it contained information on how to use Airtel connection to gain higher speeds and unlimited downloads. The information was pretty interesting enough for me to blog about. 
The author talked about how he used login ids of other subscribers to access the net and hence use the internet at the cost of others, which means it is FREE! He says that he used his friends’ login details, who used a plan with higher speed and unlimited downloads. It was pretty interesting since other subscribers also followed up his findings and confirmed that they are indeed able to access the net and use it at the expense of others. It seems that Airtel has a very serious security flaw in its system. This means that all the users of Airtel Broadband will be under the element of doubt if their bills go beyond expectations.
Being an employee of Airtel Broadband Services, I was interested to know more about this particular flaw and its reasons and implications. After a bit if investigation I found that it was not a security breach from the part of Airtel, but from the side of the subscribers who never changed their password and hence risked a hack in. Moreover the truth is that all logins are attached to a phone and only that phone can access the net with that particular id. If any other username is used, it will return a error – “Authentication Failure”.
Ok, I can see the question rising,
“Then how was that guy and many others able to access the net??”
I had that doubt too, it seems that the guy was lucky enough to find a connection that had not been fixed by Airtel, the others used this id and merely confirmed that they are able to access the net. In the later posts the guys says that he is not able to access the net from any id and hence concludes that Airtel has fixed the “flaw”, but he is more than happy to have downloaded 500MB at Rs. 0 (Zero Only!).
So, days are normal again and you pay for what you use. 
Sorry if the headline misled you
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