If you move around a lot, being able to access data on your phone alone won’t cut it for long. There is the option of tethering your phone for that, but it eats up your phone battery pretty quickly if you are dependent on the phone for things other than using it as an access point.
After trying out various approaches — dongles, tethering — I have figured that the optimal solution is to carry one of those pocket wifi routers. They cost little and tend to be stabler than tethering your phone and saves you the trouble of installing drivers and horrible dialer software that data dongles usually require you to do.
I had picked up the Lava W150 in November 2012 along with a Tata Indicom (Docomo for the rest of India) dongle. The device is Huawei-made and branded as Lava (as it is the case with most of the cheap Indian phone devices these days) and runs embedded Linux.
The Web admin UI is powered by the GoAhead Web Server and it provides for a advanced options. It is not the most user-friendly experience that you can have, but it does its job quite well, even if it has a bad habit of restarting everything for major configuration changes.
The device is only one part of the data-on-the-move equation, the other (and the more important part) is finding a data plan that won’t ruin you. I have a preference here for pre-paid plans as my usage is erratic and I don’t want to pay a fixed high amount for capacity that I’ll rarely use.
The golden rule with pre-paid data plan pricing is that you have to hit the road and find out from the vendors what is the best available plan. The ones that companies advertise online is not often the best ones out there and I went looking for 30 GB for Rs 5000 plan and found one that gave me 32 GB instead.
The other issue with picking a provider is knowing your travel pattern well. The overall coverage and quality of coverage differs from state-to-state and provider-to-provider. My strategy is to use Airtel on the phone (2G plan that has a quota of 2GB of transfer every month at Rs 149), Indicom on the pocket router and a backup on the Micromax A73 with a 1.1GB 3G plan on MTNL.
It has been a good experience overall and with controlled usage I have finished only 8 GB of data of the 32 GB that I am allowed. The good thing about the Indicom plan is that it has a validity for a year, so I can probably use it all year at the current burn rate that I have.
Data On The Move: Lava W150 + Tata Indicom 32GB Plan
