The launch of 3G in India has been one big news for several days in the past. With public sector telecom companies taking the first mover advantage, the private players will also not leave any stone unturned to catch up and/or move ahead once they enter the battlefield – and here’s Airtel Upfront to take the challenge.
Airtel 3G Launch :
on Jan 24, Airtel has announced 3G in Bangalore and for other places in India, they are expected to be rolled out in phases over the next few days or weeks. The whole exercise is expected to be completed before March 2011.
Airtel 3G Will Not Come Cheap :
Airtel has always focused more on the customer experience than on the pricing. During the press meet, Airtel CEO, Mr. Sanjay Kapoor, kept iterating this and made sure that they are not going for any price-wars at this time. So do not expect any cheap plans for now.
There are a total of 9 plans cut across 4 categories – 3G PAYG VBC plan(default rate), 3 Sachet plans(2 Bandwidth-based & 1 Minute-based), 4 Standard Plans and a FlexiShield Plan. You can check out the details in the table below.
Some disappointment is expected from the customers out there as there are no unlimited plans as such, which is a bummer for sure(the Airtel CEO kept it clear that their point of focus is not in the pricing but with the user experience). Also, in the FlexiShield Plan, Â it seems users will not be able to choose the Max bill pay cap and it is set to Rs. 2000 by default. That is not good. Â Even the speed after the bill cap is reached is set at 20kbps according to their mail, which again seems ridiculous. As of now, we can only hope that Airtel changes this soon.
Along with the 3G SIM cards, Airtel also announced the launch of Airtel 3G Data cards which come in 2 variants – 3.6Mbps and 7.2Mbps. The prices of data cards are yet to be announced and we will update them here as soon as we get hold of it.
All said and done, it might sound ridiculous to our international readers, but the fact of the matter is, here in India, we are jumping around to see 3G on our mobile devices when our counterparts in the west are almost ready with 4G LTE. But as they say, There’s never a bad time to do a right thing. No worries. We are late but we’ll get there ASAP.
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