The idea of mobility had always excited me. I really like to be able to access my work and other stuff while being on the move.
Wireless internet access has been around for quite some time in the form of GPRS and EDGE tethered through mobile phones. But the speed had always been so bad that one could not ever think about doing any “work” on such a connection.
I was very excited when HSIA became a reality in India. Many providers like Tata Teleservices, Virgin Mobile, Reliance Communications, etc started providing USB sticks which could be used for mobile internet access up to 3.1 Mbps. The USB sticks were however programmed devices which were locked to the provider. This very reason of putting money and getting stuck to a provider kept me from subscribing to such a service.
However this time when I was going to Calcutta for a surgery, I convinced myself for getting a USB modem which would allow me to have internet access while I was in the Hospital. I had cornered on two providers, Reliance NetConnect Broadband+ and Tata Photon+.
My first impression with Tata was terrible. I got in touch with a representative who visited my office with a demo device. The speed was pretty impressive. However it did not work with Snow Leopard due to some driver issues. I decided to go for the connection and submitted all the forms and documents to the executive. However he did not turn up for the next 2 days with the new device. I thanked my stars and decided to move on.
A couple of days later, I visited the Reliance Website and found an option to buy the USB device online. However I left the registration form incomplete on the online store and decided to research a bit more. Strangely I got a call from a Reliance Executive in Delhi who wanted to “assist” me in buying the device. I must say that he had excellent marketing skills and he “got” me. He promised to get the device delivered by the end of the day and he held up his end of the deal.
As per the conversation with the executive, the device was supposed to be activated the next day. But that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen the day after, either. I just got too busy with work to follow it up further.
3 days later, I got a call on my mobile phone inquiring whether I am using the Netconnect Device. On cross questioning, the executive confirmed that the device has already been activated.
Now comes the tricky part. Most of the users for these devices use Microsoft Windows. So when I asked about Snow Leopard to the customer care, they were completely clueless. However I did find an “installer” for MacOS on the Reliance Website. I am always skeptical about installing software just for the heck of it. I was trying to find out if I could get around without installing their “Advanced Dialler”. I was using a ZTE device and unfortunately I found out that it is not possible to not use the dialer. Apparently its not just the dialer, but it also includes a driver for the device.
Strangely, I found that my battery runtime drastically went down when I was using the Netconnect Device. I found it hard to believe that just a USB stick is pulling down my Battery life of 4+ hours to just 2.5 hours. Further poking around revealed that iostat was reporting back extremely high disk writes. Curious about what is going on, I checked with lsof which files are being used. To my horror, I found that the dialer is so advanced that it writes an extremely verbose debug log to /var/log/system.log. As a result of the continuous writes, the disk was active the whole time the system was on battery and hence the low battery time.
At this point, I had enough of mobility and finally sold the device on Ebay. I guess the eternal wait for the auction of 3G spectrum in India resumes.
Reliance Rest in Peace. 