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Airtel 4G data plans for Dongle and 4G home routers - a BIG joke
So, Airtel just launched their 4G services in whole India (read this). Do you feel excited, well you must be as now 4G will be available in major cities around the country courtesy Bharti Airtel which is the largest telecom provider by number of users in India. Ofcourse we will soon see Reliance Jio launching pan India 4G services on even a bigger scale but today its talk about Airtel 4G.
Before going deep into, lets see Airtel 4G home router plans taken from airtel website.
However, I am little confused about this launch, what is the reason to launch 4G when you can't take advantage of it at all. From the pricing and practical life usage of 4G, nothing above makes sense.
Example 1 :
Lets consider this simple case, you are a regular youtube watcher and since you have 4G LTE which can theoretically provide download speed upto 100mbps , lets assume , you are receiving at least 50mbps downstream speeds. So, to use your 4G LTE connection, you purchased Airtel home 4G router which can connect upto 32 devices at home using WIFI network.
Now, on your smart TV or even on your PC, you are watching Youtube video in HD mode ie. 720p resolution, if you check your bandwidth usage or in simple terms .. check your download speed, its about 3mbps while you watch HD video from youtube. So far, so good because you have around 50mbps download link, while you need only 3mbps.
Now lets do some simple calculations, well, you watched a 30 minute HD video on youtube, do you know how much data you will use ?
If taking 3mbps average, by 30 minutes you will use around 730mb of data approximately. It means, if you buy Rs. 7995 per month plan which provides 160GB of monthly transfer, then only you can do some sustainable video stream over the internet. Now lets say, you have 3 to 4 members in family, everyone is making 1 hours daily youtube usage then it will be minimum 4GB a day (an approximate), it means you will exhaust 120GB data in a month. This is I am calculating on lower side, what about other stuff, like Facebook, emails, regular surfing etc ?
Example 2:
Now consider another case, say I am a gamer and I play DOTA 2 over steam which is quite popular and nice game, initial download size of the game is about 6-10 GB and also there are regular update of 300mb -500 mb and sometimes even bigger. Then also love to play Titanfall which takes around 45 GB space in my hdd, battlefield which also eats around 35 GB space inside my computer and it all comes via download from Internet. So unless you are a rich gamer, you can manage to go away with their 100GB or 160GB plan otherwise they don't even think about 4G.
Example 3:
Lets see one more scenario, say you are digital 3D artist, you create environments, you create models and you want to send them over internet, well, these pieces are generally large, data spanning over GBs. So again, you have speed but you can't use it with confidence unless you have their higher end plan.
There could be many more example, say you are using it in office, there are all kinds of people and even their costliest plan will run out too soon. And there is one more caveat, I am yet to see any truly unlimited plan even with FUP, it means you will end up paying a lot if you cross your FUP, I think its Rs. 0.20 per mb you use over given limit. And on 4G LTE you can easily get 50mbps speed, it means per second you could be spending Rs. 10 or more.
Its a recipe of disaster for users, are they actually betting to earn by those per MB charges ?
I have BSNL broadband, have TATA-Docomo 3G and also MTS. I get 40GB for Rs. 999 + taxes from MTS, I will prefer it over costly and unpractical Airtel 4G anytime. I know MTS network is sometimes saturated but it does gets work done, similarly with other 3G services, you may not get those speed but I think unless you don't have any special need, an average of 3-4 mbps is fine at economical price rather than 50mbps or 100mbps plans completely out of reach of regular internet user.
No wonder that 4G adaptation is sluggish for Airtel. From common layman's perspective, I don't see why Airtel is even investing on 4G network, they think that average Indian internet user is earning 100K per month so that he / she may not mind spending more than 5K on internet. They do have cheaper plan but on 4G LTE, they are nothing more than a JOKE. What if Reliance Jio comes with cheaper plans, they already gave cues about their data plans pricing which could be atleast half of current 3G data prices.
I hope someone from Airtel reads things and think about their pricing once again.
