Hi,

We just want to let all of our customers on the Aircel fixed minute and Unlimited Calling Circle plans know that you can now use the Top Up tool on the website to buy additional minutes for your account. To do this, just login to your account and look for the Top Up box located at the bottom of the page:

You can buy blocks of minutes starting at 100 minutes up to 1000 minutes. You will pay the same price per minute for Top Up minutes as your monthly minutes cost. For the Unlimited Calling Circle customers, you can add to the 1000 minutes you get to call India for 1.1 cents per minute.

Top Up is available for:

Aircel 500
Aircel 1000
Aircel 1500
Aircel 2000
Aircel Unlimited Calling Circle

Here is the explanation for what happened to our USA access numbers today:

Downtime: 45 Minutes
Area Affected: USA
Impact: Primary access numbers only allowed intermittent connections.
Compensation: 90 free minutes for each USA account, 3 million minutes total.

As you may know, our access number provider added additional capacity to our access numbers on Friday. This was necessary to handle the growing amount of traffic on our system. When they added this capacity, a technician accidentally changed the routing scheme that is used to send SIP connections from their trunks to our colo facility. The change in the routing rules resulted in our router getting flooded with connection requests and not rolling those requests over to our other servers.

In a nutshell, our router was getting sent inbound calls in a less efficient manner than it is used to. When we hit our Saturday peak, the router was not able to process all of those calls. Furthermore, the fail over method we use could not kick in because it too did not understand what the incoming requests were saying. We are working closely with our provider to prevent this from happening again.

I was in the park with my daughter when I got the first Facebook notification we were down. 45 minutes later our techs had the issue resolved. One of them was getting ready for his girlfriend’s college graduation (Sorry Hollee and congrats!) and the other had just landed at LAX. Thanks to them and our access number provider’s NOC, we had the problem fixed quickly.

To make up for being down during this peak period, I have added 90 minutes of free calling to the accounts of all active USA customers. If you are on a fixed minute plan, your packaged balance has 90 more minutes. If you are on the 1.5 cent calling card, your balance has an extra $1.35 on it. If you are on Quarter Calls, your balance has an extra $1.25 minutes.

In total, I just gave away over 3 million minutes of free calling. My partners will probably kill me for this or dock my pay severely, but its important for IndiaLD to let all of you know how much we value your business. This is especially true for all of our new customers who haven’t enjoyed hundreds of hours of calling to India with us yet.

If you were one of the callers who was affected this morning, please accept these minutes as our apology.

If you were not affected this morning and are just finding out about this now, enjoy the free minutes.

If you are in the US and cannot connect using one of our normal access numbers, please use 1 (323) 500-4026.

Our main access number provider is having an issue. The 1 (323) 500-4026 is on an alternate network and will work.

Apologies for the troubles. We are in contact with our primary access number provider and helping them to resolve the issue.

Hi,

IndiaLD has been getting pretty big lately, and it looks like we are going to continue growing at this rate for the next couple of months. While growth is great, one of the downsides is that you need to increase your capacity in many different ways. Some of you may have noticed that our access numbers had busy signals during peak times last week. This was because we were maxing out our inbound connections. Part of this problem was solved yesterday when we significantly increased capacity on our US lines.

We need your help to solve the other part. The next time you login to your account, please look for your new assigned access number here:

From now on, we would like you to use the access number that appears in your account when you use IndiaLD. To put it in techie terms that many of you will understand, we are doing some load distribution on our access numbers and would appreciate it if you made the switch. By spreading our traffic out over a whole bunch of access numbers in different locations, it will help us to keep growing and avoid the dreaded busy signals that happen at peak times.

Another benefit of doing this is that a certain “magical” VOIP service keeps illegally blocking our access numbers. Because we are tired of constantly changing our access numbers, we’ve decided to pull the US numbers off the front facing part of the site and assign them individually in the account area.

We are keeping our existing access numbers open, but are asking all of you to do your part and make the switch. It will take a lot of the burden off our big workhorse numbers and allow the system to function more efficiently.

Right now, 4% of all calls from the US to India run through IndiaLD. That’s hundreds of millions of minutes a year. Help us to keep the quality of those calls top notch by changing your access number today.

Thanks,

Chris

We are going to be offline for 2 hours on Monday February 7th starting at 1PM PST. This is a standard upgrade that will allow us to make better use of our call routing software, and should result in improvements in how we route calls internationally.

As always, we are sorry to take the service down. We have scheduled the downtime during our lightest calling period to minimize any inconvenience.

IndiaLD is cutting rates to call India from the US with the introduction of our new US to India plans:

500 minutes are just $4.45
1000 minutes are just $7.95
1500 minutes are $13.95
2000 minutes are $19.95
Unlimited minutes are just $29.95

These are some amazing rates that you won’t find anywhere else. All of our US to India plans are priced under a penny with 500 and 1000 minutes just $0.008 per minute. You can find all of our new plans here: http://www.indiald.com/countries/usa.

If you are an existing IndiaLD customer and only call from the US to India, then you can change your current plan to one of our new US plans by contacting customer service and asking to be moved. Please realize that these plans require that you only make calls through our US access number. You cannot share these plans with anyone living outside the USA. Because many of our customers in the US also have family and friends around the world using their plans, we are not automatically converting you to our new US plans.

We are very excited to be able to offer these extremely low rates and our new US to India unlimited plan to our customers. Because we do so much traffic out of the US, we have been able to significantly lower our costs in the US and pass the savings on to you.

IndiaLD is proud to introduce 6 new calling plans in partnership with Aircel. Aircel is one of the largest mobile operators in India with over 45 million subscribers, and now through IndiaLD you can make unlimited calls to them.

In addition to unlimited calling plans, we are also offering the ability for Aircel subscribers in India to make calls to the USA and Canada. For the first time ever, you can have the people close to you in India make calls back to you on the same IndiaLD account. You can add any Aircel subscriber to your account, and then they can call you through a 5 digit short code that does not use up their airtime!

For the heavy users, we offer an all Aircel unlimited plan that lets you make unlimited calls to all Aircel mobiles for just $29.95 per month.

If your friends and family all use Aircel, buy the Aircel Unlimited Calling Circle for $24.95. You get 1000 minutes to call anywhere in Inida, and 5 Aircel lines in India can make unlimited calls to the US and Canada.

If you are missing that special someone, we offer a 1 to 1 unlimited calling plan for just $17.95. You can make unlimited calls to one Aircel subscriber and they can make unlimited calls to you.

Finally we got our Happy Hour plan. For just $14.95, you can make 1 hour of calls per day either to India or from India to the US & Canada.

If you are looking for a fixed minute plan, we are also offering 500 minutes of calling for $7.95 or 1000 minutes of calling for $14.95. These plans let you make calls to anywhere in India and you can add Aircel mobile lines in India to call anywhere in the US and Canada.

Enjoy unlimited calling to Aircel mobiles in India, and calling from Aircel to the US & Canada. Calling from India is super easy too. Add the Aircel subcriber’s mobile number to your account, then tell them to dial short code 59778, from there they can dial the US and Canada. Calling the short code will not use up their Aircel airtime, it will just use the IndiaLD account minutes.

Learn about all of unlimited India calling plans here.

IndiaLD is proud to announce our new partnership with Radio City 91.1 FM.

Radio City is one of the biggest FM stations in all India, and now its available to IndiaLD subscribers for free online and over the phone.

IndiaLD is getting feeds of 5 of Radio City Mumbai’s most popular shows. From Monday through Saturday, we get daily updates of their morning drive time show Kasa Kai Mumbai and their evening drive time show Joy Ride. Each Sunday we get the Bollywood music, news, and gossip show Parde Ke Peche, the weekly hits show Great Indian Countdown, and Whatte Fun Mornings.

All shows feature a mix of Hindi hits and RJ talk catching you up on the events of the day, jokes, and celebrity interviews.

You can listen to these shows either by logging into the account management area and clicking on the Radio City link or by calling into our radio hotline at 916 844-3355. Each show is broken up by day and hour so that you can pick the show you want to hear when you want to listen to it. We update the shows daily so you can listen to fresh radio programming from India on demand.

This is a free service that is open to all of our customers except for those based in India. Due to regulations, we cannot stream FM radio within India.

Radio City streaming on IndiaLD.com and over the phone at 916 844 3355 comes free of charge for our customers. To listen online, login to your account.

Enjoy.

IndiaLD’s free SMS to India service will be offline for the next three days.

The government in India has announced that it is banning all bulk SMS delivery in India for the next 3 days due to the upcoming Ayodhya verdict. The government feels that SMS could be used to stir up unrest and therefore is suspending bulk SMS delivery. Our service provider in India has informed us that this ban will affect their ability to deliver messages.

We are sorry about this, but as you can see the ban has come down from the top. We recommend that you use alternate means of communicating during the next couple of days.

Here is an article about the ban for those who are curious:

Bulk SMS, MMS banned ahead of Ayodhya verdict

IndiaLD needs to go down for an upgrade on Wed, Sept 22nd from 12 to 4 PM Pacific Time. During this time, you will not be able to make call or login to the website.

This upgrade will allow us to implement new routing technology that we have acquired which should improve our call connection rate.

We apologize for the inconvenience.