A limited “unlimited”

As I’ve wrote at wordpress blog, I got myself a *brand new* USB modem (or so the seller said). I bought a cheap Telkomsel unlimited plan, since the Tri starter pack that bundled with the modem didn’t connect, initially (more on that later).

A 50K rupiah for unlimited plan with 200MB quota seems reasonable at that time, even though Telkomsel didn’t always held the promises. They claimed I could get maximum speed of 384kbps, while in reality it never goes past 50kbps, even on fair usage period. When the fair usage reached, it’s just went downhill. I’d rather refill the prepaid credit and reset the quota than to wait a page load for minutes (sometimes I have to unplug-then-plug-back the modem).

Well, my fault for picking the cheapest plan. At first 200MB seems like enough quota, but now I know it’s only enough for 4 days browsing. A week at max. You know how websites these days; they eat bandwith like there’s no tomorrow (AJAX, big image files, YouTube embedded video, etc). I practically had to use mobile version of websites I visit whenever it’s available to reduce bandwith usage. Still, like I said, it’ll only last a week max.

But all not lost. Just tonight, I’ve found that the Tri starter pack actually work. It’s just that I’ve been using wrong configuration. While their websites and included manual states that I had to use “3data” APN, the modem actually use “3gprs” to get Internet connection *sigh*. Makes you wonder what else they didn’t tell us right… Maybe it had somehing with coverage area…

Anyway, 35K rupiah for 1GB quota, now THAT’s a deal. Or is it 500MB? Well, it’s still better than others offer though. I think I’ll stick to this one