Which USB Internet dongle works best in India? (tests done in Delhi and Mumbai)

June 23, 2014 in Uncategorized
Tags: ISP Dongle

Our entire team was struggling with poor internet speeds offered by The Reliance Netconnect + Internet Dongles. While they promised speeds of over 8 MBPS, we were getting very poor download speeds. We decided to check out other dongles available in the market. Available dongles were:

1. Reliance Netconnect + (CDMA version and GSM version)
2. Airtel GSM
3. Vodafone GSM
4. MTS Mblaze CDMA version

We quickly dropped the GSM options offered by Airtel and Vodafone because:

• Nothing in their communication (on website or company stores suggested that they are confident of their internet dongle offering)
• We also had doubts given the network issues that we experienced with voice services of Airtel and Vodafone

So, now we had two contenders- MTS Mblaze CDMA and Reliance Netconnect +

We decided to test their performance in different places. We tested the two dongles at 6 different locations across Mumbai and Delhi NCR. We used http://www.speedtest.net for all the tests. Here are at the results.

1. MTS Mblaze offered speeds of over 5Mbps almost everywhere. It beat Reliance, by a large margin, everywhere except one location in Mumbai.
2. Reliance Netconnect + had a top speed of 1.13 Mbps and that too was not consistent. It failed to work at the Mumbai Domestic airport.

We have thus moved all our team members (15+ members) from Reliance Netconnect + to MTS Mblaze.

Whats good with MTS now:

1. Good download speeds
2. Very easy activation and usage. You insert the dongle and the internet connectivity is established in less than a minute
3. The dongle offered by MTS creates a wifi network, for use with upto 5 devices.

Here are the screenshots of the test results from the 6 different locations.

Location #1 : Mohan Cooperative, Okhla, New Delhi

MTS

Reliance

Location #2: Faridabad, Sector 37

MTS

Reliance

Location #3: Delhi Airport, Terminal 1D

MTS

Reliance

 

Location #4: Mahim West, Mumbai

MTS

Reliance

Location #5: Juhu, Mumbai

MTS

Reliance

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Location #6: Domestic Airport, Mumbai

MTS

Reliance: Did not work at all.