Wesley, Three things: 1. Funnily, some could say you're fast approaching the "spoilt for choice" situation:-) So many to choose from till one says "Choosing no more, I'll take all of them" he he he . (I hear there are (or plans) for 4 SIM card handsets..) 2. Seriously, it's a shame that local mobicos (incumbent and newer) never bother to research on consumers' needs. Like dictators, they hand down 'products' they have thought and concluded they are very good for the consumer. Why bother conducting 'costly' consumer-involved research... when they know what good for you. Their 'research' is side-effect/symptoms observed oriented. i.e. they pick after-effects (e.g. from lurk on lists, adverse media reports then apply fixes to extreme few cases... 3. They all introduce wonderful new products and services to attract customers, then as soon as customer flock, they start playing games with them using sexy phareseology like "network optimisation" (when they mean 'revenue maximisation') in "emerging markets" ( when they mean 'African won't know what we are are up to' ). Then they start degrading or stopping good ('network costly') services without bothering to notify subscribers in advance. 4. Fourthly and unfortunately, your case is proof enough that their approach leads to poor consumer loyalty-each one of use ever on the verge of 'ahoy' jump ship:-) should the next door provider offer something more decent. ISPs used to call it customer 'churn' (me thinks its the same with our political parties:-) know off target from your specific request, lakini, I hope at least it got you mused? cheers, On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 1:16 PM, wesley kiriinya <kiriinya2000@yahoo.com>wrote:

Thought I wud share on the great dilema of internet bundle offers from various telcos.

I bought a YU line yesterday and at 100 bob I get to keep my older number but with the YU prefix. I got the line primarily for internet coz their bundle seems to be the cheapest. I tried it out for about an hour and I was a satisfied customer.

One may wonder why I would rather use my phone than buy a modem from any of the networks (in this case Orange, $afcom, YU). Although it's more expensive, probably twice the cost, it's far more reliable and the bandwidth seems to be higher. On $afcom there are very few instances when I couldn't log on the net via my phone and each time downloads speeds are about 26KB/s (Note KB not Kb). On the other hand my experience with the modem has been miserable, actually I can't remember when I've connected to the net using the modem. I'm testing YU next week and I might as well get an Orange line. More on that on the next paragraph.

So I now have a YU line and a $afcom line and one phone. New plan is to buy a dual sim phone (around 4,500) and buy an Orange SIM. So when I'm surfing using one line, the rest of the two lines can be in the dual SIM line. So guys can still call me on any of my lines and I can surf the net using any of the lines.

Onto one of the most important items, costs: I would say that for someone who needs a reliable net connection via mobile then the modems might be a disappointment. Using a 3G/Edge enabled phone to connect *may cost more* but the value outweighs the savings if using a modem bundle. (Clarifications needed from other people's experiences).

Estimating the costs for someone who wants to start from Scratch: A 3G/Edge enabled phone would be around 15K, a dual SIM phone would be around 4,500 so lets round the cost to 20K for both (u have to buy the 3 lines:Orange, $afcom, YU and put some credit). Let me estimate 4,500 per modem which comes to around 14K for the 3 modems. The saving here is 6K. However note that with the phones one can make cheaper phone calls, and with all these promotions and the competition I believe the 6K will be easily offset.

So what is left are the monthly costs: If one is using data (which I assume is the main reason you've read this far) then the telco with cheapest data rate makes most sense to use which in this case is YU @ 3bob/MB. If in a day one mainly opens web pages and chats, an average of 3MB, and once in a while downloads an average of 4MB then usage in a day is around 7MB, but lets double that and make it 14MB. So in a day that's 42 bob and in 20 working days, why not even make it 30 days, it's 1,260 bob. That sounds good! For those once in a while big downloads of 30MB or more, an internet cafe/hot spot might suffice. This assumes 3bob/MB which can change and go up. With cheaper bandwidth and the competition in the market I don't see it going up past 5 bob/MB. The telcos with more than 5 bob/MB will likely bring it down.

So there it is. Anyone doing the same, I (we) would appreciate your input.

8~)

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