Friday, January 22, 2010

Indian mobile network providers should work on VAS

India's mobile networks have been buzzing with low charges on calls and more recently on messages as well. From very high calling rates in the initial years we have now reached the stage where we are probably the cheapest nation in terms of call charges. Call rates trickled from pulse (3minutes) to a minute and now paying by the second. In the same breath, messages also have started being charged on the basis of characters used rather than a whole 160 character message.

With this whole reduction in prices of calls and messages, one thing has gone missing and thats value added services. Sure, caller tunes have been in operation since quite some time to replace the boring tring-tring but other than that there has been nothing to offer to the customer. One service which I have been using for quite some time has been GPRS/Mobile Internet and haven't seen any improvements in this regard over the period that I've used. The speeds are awfully low and loading of pages takes an eternity.


Now I was hoping speeds would improve with a better handset and I had a BlackBerry in consideration. (Yeah I know, I don't get that many mails and I'm not a businessman or whatever but the BlackBerry's look so cool!) I was thinking of getting a BlackBerry 8250 Curve.

So I went about checking Vodafone's website for charges for data connection and that's where my dreams were shattered. So the Vodafone Delhi people who probably have yet to come to terms with 2009 have the following data charges :

  • Rs 299 (monthly rental) - you can use the E-mail services and download as many attachments as you want without any problems. You can use messengers such as Yahoo, GTalk, BlackBerry Messenger etc etc but no web browsing and usage of third party applications. So yeah you can't use Facebook application, or Twitter or hundreds of other cool applications.
  • Rs 499 (monthly rental) - This being the most shocking one and the most ridiculous of all the plans on offer. So here you can use applications, E-mail, browser, messengers etc etc. So what does it make a stupid plan? It comes with a 500KB free data limit. Usage beyond this is 1 paisa per KB. Yeah so if you use 100KB then you're spending a rupee. A meager 100KB! Free data limit of 500KB? Gee, thanks for the generosity! Now Vodafone people, come back to 2009 when you're done playing with your pagers. Good.
  • Rs 899 (monthly rental) - Its a corporate plan so all of us who are not being helped by our company to use this fantastic mobile phone can move on to the next one.
  • Rs 1099 (monthly rental) - Yeah so now fellas who have use the BlackBerry themselves and are not salvaged by their company to pay their expenses will have to shell out Rs 1K+ for just data connection. Oh did I tell you I pay Rs 1000 for my 384KBPS connection on my laptop. Would the speed be the same you ask? Are you stupid is all I can say!
Yeah so until and unless you're ready to shell out at least 400 bucks more from your pocket every month then you're good. If not, then I suggest getting another mobile phone. I think even iPhone charges for data connection are Rs.99/month and unlimited usage. Vodafone seriously what age are you in! 

4 comments:

  1. GPRS isn't my point here. I'm ok paying Rs.0.10 per 10 KB but the charges for data services on BlackBerry are moronic. iPhone data usage is Rs.99 a month which makes sense but what makes them charge Rs.899 per month on BlackBerry makes absolutely no sense to me!

    I think these companies think we mint money here in Delhi that they would charge insane money from us while the financial capital is charged a sensible amount.

    Yeah Rs.199 per month for unlimited Internet is justified. What handset do you use?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah well that is true. BBM Pin is a good thing and I hear there is an application being developed where BlackBerry users can ping other iPhone users without any cost. There is already an application for iPhone to do that to other iPhones but now it would be inter devices.

    Yeah BlackBerry has a fantastic push E-mail notification service. Which is its biggest selling point.

    Oh ok. Recommend N900 more than Droid. Motorolas have never gone down well with me while N900 has the Maemo (Linux OS) which looks super.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I've used Android on the G1 and the touch wasn't nice but that is to do with the handset and not the software. Since I've never liked Motorola my opinion would be biased towards N900 (even though I hate Nokia's dodgy softwares!)

    ReplyDelete
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