Airtel's Data Card, the Real Truth :)

Are you a road warrior like me? My family jokes around saying I would have made more money as a chauffer with the amount of driving I do across India. Well my work takes me places, and one thing that i need is to connect to the internet, google and email is my soul food.

Getting connected across India till a few years back was unthinkable. All holidays (if any) meant that you had to goto a town and search for the cybercafe there, and fix a full day price in place of a per hour price, once done that, you had to pursuade those guys to let you hook up your laptop so that you could work peacefully. I have paid 100's of Rupees for all this stupid connectivity issue. Then came in GPRS.. from Airtel, a great product, priced at Rs. 499 a month flat for unlimited usage. Last year, Airtel went ahead and announced EDGE on it's network, also an India wide roll out of their network, now they were in every city, and you could roam on the Airtel network use your Edge / GPRS and do what you wanted over the internet. Yes it worked, all for Rs. 499 a month plus taxes.

I recently had major troubles with GPRS services, and changed my handset from a Nokia 6600 to a Nokia 6021, and eversince had no issues. I have on my trips experienced speeds of upto 200 kilo bits per second (I am not joking), but usually get a good sustained rate of 30 to 50 kilo bits per second, which is great.. for my kind of work on the road.

When Airtel announced their quad band edge / gprs card, I jumped on, got interested and called them up, a few of my friends bought it, but I went into a think, should I buy it or not. Today after another long discussion with airtel, I came up with the following, and I think you will find this interesting.

On your phone Airtel offers, two kinds of packs, pay as much as you use, or a flat Rs. 499 a month pack which i have, which I find ideal, who is going to keep tab of how much spam I downloaded.

On the Card, they have three plans, Rs. 399 for 100 megs of download and Rs. 5 Per Meg after that, Rs. 599 for 1 GB of download and Rs. 3 Per MB After that, Rs. 799 for 1.5 GB of Download and Rs. 3 Per MB after that.

My questions to Airtel,

• Why not introduce a flat tarrif on it ? Like I have the one on my phone !
  
• Why not let me use the GPRS I have on my voice card on this (If I can, why can't the same tarrif apply)
  
• What if I was to import a card similar from OPTION (yes that this the company they are buying it from)
  
• What is the sense of 599 for 1 GB and 799 for 1.5 GB, did I get any benefit (yes Rs. 2)
  

No Answers.. nada.. and the price for the card Rs. 12,999

Well this product is not for me. I dont know about you !

G