Hands On: 3G

It took 34 days and 183 rounds of bidding: 3G auction in India, which started in April last year, was definitely running on top of the minds of the decision makers of all the major telecom giants. While Tata DoCoMo became the first private player to launch 3G services in India, Aircel, Airtel, Idea, Reliance, Vodafone and many regional players have soon joined the league. Of course, the state-owned players, MTNL and BSNL are in the race with the most nominal plans available in 3G market in an attempt to compete with the private majors. The high speed Third Generation mobile telecom standard, 3G is slowly but surely spanning a majority of telecom circles across the country, but is it really worth it for the consumer? Does it really hold all that promises to deliver? Frankly, it's not quite there yet, as we found by doing our own testing as well as doing a survey of users who're already using 3G. We'll let you find out yourself why this is so by exploring our detailed performance test reports as well as our survey findings. What we want to focus on here are some guidelines on choosing a 3G service provider.

Check signal strength

The most important thing to find out before going for 3G is about its signal strength in your area. Even if you get 3G services in your area, there's no guarantee that you'll get a full signal strength. In fact, we've had users complain to us that they get varying signal strength even as they move around in their home or office, while their 2G signal is rock-steady! Whatever be the reason for this, you must ensure that you get full signal strength in your area. Otherwise, you'll waste a lot of money unnecessarily on it.

Scrutinize plans

If you're confused about the various 2G plans offered by telecom operators, then you'll remain equally confused with 3G! That's because the same trend follows here again. There are lots of plans available, with different data usage limits, free SMSs, voice calls, etc. Since 3G is still relatively costly, you need to read the fine print before choosing any plan-you're sure to find some catch or the other. We've already tried doing this for you in our reviews of the 3G services offered by various operators. Incidentally, the plans are available at the click of a button on the websites of all the service providers, but we've consolidated a gist of almost all their data plans in a separate article.

We have specifically, tried to drill down on things to look for beyond just tariffs and MBs, i.e, the 'tariff traps' which a customer may experience only after he has fallen into one. Say for example, you need to keep a keen eye on choosing a plan which claims to provide unlimited data usage but is actually capped at some high end limit of a few GBs. What happens after you exceed the capped data limit is that not only your data rates are deducted (on paise/KB basis) out of your main account balance but also your download speed may get significantly reduced as per the plan you have activated. More information on such traps in individual write-ups of service providers!

Choosing the right 3G

services

Video Calling — yes, it is possible and we experienced the same in our tests! We could make video calls across service providers between Delhi and Mumbai. Though the video quality varied from being pixilated to 'almost' sharp, but the experience was just worth it. That brings us to the point of discussion of choosing value added services such as video calling, Mobile TV and the plans associated. Talking about Mobile TV, which lets you view TV channels right on your handset, come with daily, weekly and monthly plans for a specific channel of your choice or bundled for multiple channels. The rates of plans may slightly vary as per choice of premium and non-premium channels.

Choosing a 3G handset

There are two types of handsets available in the market on the basis of mobile telephony communication protocol — WCDMA and HSPA/HSDPA.

WCDMA or R99 devices are based on the lower version of 3G mobile communication protocol which supports data transfer up to 384 Kbps (uplink and downlink) only which is much slower as compared to HSDPA. HSPA devices are high speed 3G devices that can support speeds upto 14.4 Mbps(downlink) and 5.76 Mbps(uplink). So, ideally one should go for an HSPA/HSDPA mobile handset. Both the handsets used in our testing were HSPA so that we do not face any challenges on data speeds due to hardware constraints. Both the devices used in the testing phase(HTC Desire HD and Nokia E72) were HSPA/HSDPA devices so that we do not face any speed constraints due to the choice of hardware. The other thing you need to remember is that 3G is a battery guzzler. If you keep it on, it really drains out the battery, so you'll need to choose a phone that offers really good battery backup.

Besides, PCQ Labs just went that extra mile to cover on the advanced usage of 3G where we have talked on how 3G can be used for surveillance and running your websites besides the scenario where the operators have blocked incoming ports to do so. And, of course, our supplement of the month carries few of the best smart-phone apps for professionals which you may like to filter for the ones that leverage 3G speeds. One point worth mentioning to our readers is that we missed on the test analysis and end-user experience of Aircel, Idea and Tata DoCoMo, due to the non-availability of their 3G services in our telecom circles at the time of compiling this story. However, we have given the purchase and data plan analysis of the same in one our sectional stories on data plans.

Happy 3G Experience!