Talk:India/@comment-31946815-20181104132555

Got an Airtel SIM at Delhi airport, T3 arrivals, in the morning. They made copies of my passport (photo page und visa) and took a photo of me. No need to provide Indian contact details or anything else. I paid INR 1000 and was promised 1.4 GB/day. The price at the Vodafone booth just opposite is the same. They seemed a bit nicer and less seedy but I wanted Airtel. Once I had a network signal in the afternoon I called 59059 to confirm my details but found that no credit or Internet pack was applied to my account.

Since I was at the New Delhi railway station anyway to catch a train later in the evening, I used Google's free railway Wifi hotspot (Indian phone number needed) to send a text message to the Airtel shop via the Dellmont MobileVoip client. A short time later, I received a message from Airtel that an Internet pack had been applied (INR 448, 1.4 GB/day for 70 days) and I got data working several moments later. A few days later I also received ~ INR 300 call credit but that was probably a mistake.

And yes, you have to activate data roaming if you go to another state but there are no surcharges as already mentioned on this page. Overall, download speeds on Airtel were OK, but definitely nothing to write home about and there are certainly situations where you'll only have Edge and very slow or no Internet (rural areas) or 4G but even pings time out (larger cities). Also, be aware that you'll constantly get text messages from Airtel and push messages via their app offering this and that. Quite annoying.

I also went to the state of Jammu & Kashmir and of course my Delhi-based Airtel SIM card wasn't working there, Also, none of my foreign SIM cards were working there, not even the postpaid ones: o2 Germany postpaid, 1&1 Vodafone Germany postpaid, Magticom Georgia prepaid, Azercell Azerbaijan prepaid, Swisscom prepaid, Koko Mobile prepaid, TravelSIM prepaid. Will have to see what my postpaid providers say about this.

Quite interestingly, if you are coming close to the state of Himachal Pradesh (to the south of J&K) where domestic and foreign SIM cards work just fine, you'll see two Airtel networks by the same name, i.e. 2x "Airtel IN 4G", 2x "Airtel IN 3G" or sometimes slightly different names and you can obviously only access one of them. I don't know if this is the same for other Indian states, just an observation I hadn't seen before.

And on a final note, I tried to use the Internet with my Koko Mobile and TravelSIM SIM cards at the New Delhi railway station. While Koko Mobile was considerably cheaper, it was not very reliable and slow to the point that web sites wouldn't open at all and larger emails (>20-30 kB) weren't sent and I had to switch to TravelSIM where I had no such issues.