To stay connected to web at my convenience during the vacation, I took Tata Indicom Vdatacard from office. It is a PCMCIA card that has a small antenna. I had the appropriate drivers to install this device on my HP nc6400 notebook. I doubly ensured the functionality, working condition of this datacard before carrying it out of station. It was working really good in Bangalore at a good rate of about 230kbps. But the trouble started soon after me going out of Karnataka region. Though the signal was available and the Huawei Mobile Connect application showed the signal strength to be good, I had no luck in getting connected. All the times, I was getting the error which said”Remote port is not available to connect. Please Contact customer care”.
The claim is that the data card works on Tata Indicom’s CDMA network, so internet services work wherever there’s tata indicom’s mobile phone network, this was not true in my case! I had no clue on what was happening and gave a call to office IT folks. They had no clue either and suggested me to call up Tata Indicom Customer care and gave me their number. When I called that number, got to know that it was an automated number and it was asking for the phone number! I had no clue of what the heck that was since it was not even connecting. There was no way I could skip that automated call answering system and reach a human to explain my issue! Through out the week, I tried to connect from various places around Chittoor, AP with no success. Another interesting thing I noticed during that week was that Tata Indicom has a very poor network coverage. All the villages I have been travelling during this period were having good network coverage from Airtel, Reliance and BSNL. But Tata certainly has a very bad network throughout the district of Chittoor. Its signals are limited only to district center and high ways, but not the rural places. May be this is an area of opportunity for them to improve and play a competent role in rural India.
Srinath says
pressing 1, 2 etc is a lot better compared to automated AI based voice search services that are becoming popular.. you will have to tell the question, it will search the knowledgebase and tells u the answer.. their designs are not great.
Srinath says
pressing 1, 2 etc is a lot better compared to automated AI based voice search services that are becoming popular.. you will have to tell the question, it will search the knowledgebase and tells u the answer.. their designs are not great.
Mohan says
@Sathya
Same here.. the automated answering machines should have a way to speak to a customer care representative if customer doesn’t have appropriate numbers to punch in. It is certainly a denial of service for me!
Well, you never know when a person is required to be on duty in the kind of industry we work 🙂 As a precautionary measure to address any emergency issues, I took it along.
Sathya says
Yeah… I think the BSNL cards are good in these situations…but they are so hard to get… my next bet would be Reliance…
I really hate those IVR numbers… press 1 … press 2 press… blah … multiple levels of nesting and finally when you reach to the operator … he would be some novice reading things off a printed cheat sheet…suggestions which you would have tried much before calling them up…real annoying 🙁
But Mohan, isnt the whole idea of vacation – to take off from office … why take a data card to remind yourself of work 😛
Cheers,
Sathya
Sathya says
Yeah… I think the BSNL cards are good in these situations…but they are so hard to get… my next bet would be Reliance…
I really hate those IVR numbers… press 1 … press 2 press… blah … multiple levels of nesting and finally when you reach to the operator … he would be some novice reading things off a printed cheat sheet…suggestions which you would have tried much before calling them up…real annoying 🙁
But Mohan, isnt the whole idea of vacation – to take off from office … why take a data card to remind yourself of work 😛
Cheers,
Sathya