Mobitel HSDPA (3G) Connection - Review

After using my Mobitel 3G Data connection for more than a year, I thought of writing a small review here about it. Initially, the service was very good. Only problem I had was it did not have connectivity in my home town, Aranayake. Therefore, the advertisement of the school teacher at a rural school seemed to be misleading.

The service degraded so rapidly in recent times. Now it is at a worst situation. It is quite difficult to get connected. Most of the time it returns the “error 619” for my BandLuxe modem.

From modem literature I found that this error is due to the fact that the network refuses the connection probably because I have not paid my bill. I pay online and pay all my bills on time. So, the only probability is that Mobitel refuses the connection because they have issued more connections than they can serve. This is further substantiated by “connection drop” occurring very often, especially if no data transfers occurred for few seconds. This is real troublesome and risky when I had to do online payments. Once, a payment was done, but I could not get the certified receipt since the connection suddenly dropped.

When I’m lucky to get connected the connection speed is only 64 Kbps, which almost like GPRS (EDGE).

All these problems are there when I use it during day time, especially in late evening when many would be trying to get connected; and never occurred in dawn.

I think they drop active connections to serve the other requests for connection. In my opinion, Mobitel follows a poor business strategy. They try to increase their customer base at the expense of the satisfaction of their current customers. They will ultimately loose all their customers.

I will never recommend Mobitel 3G Data connection to you. Cheers.

Above is my personal opinion upon experience as a customer of Mobitel 3G Data connection offered by Sri Lanka Telecom Mobitel, and I have not verified the technical facts from experts.

However, You should notice that Mobitel Sri Lanka offers cheap HSDPA packages for "Upahara" users. These would not be matched by Dialog.