If you are like me, I am sure you have gone through the frustration of choosing the mobile data plan that best suits you. Most of these plans are volume based (fixed mb usage) plan with fixed duration, and you never know when your usage will be high or low. Add to that the different variations on offer, and selecting the right plan becomes a real headache sometimes.
To resolve this problem, leading mobile browser company Opera came up with “Opera Web Pass”. It allows mobile operators to package their mobile internet offerings in flexible, easy-to-understand ways to their customers. With Opera Web Pass, operators can create mobile internet offerings that are the most user-friendly for their markets — whether they be time-based, content-based or some combination of the two.
Here are some examples: A week long pass for a popular app or a 1 day pass for unlimited web browsing. Check out this video to know more.
Opera Web pass obviously takes advantage of their Opera mini browser, which is what customer needs to use to access the internet on the mobile.
Now, two leading Indian operators – Vodafone & Idea – have announced that they will start offering mobile internet to their customers with Opera Web Pass. Last year in February, Airtel had forged similar partnership with Opera.
Although Vodafone has announced its partnership with Opera, the Vodafone Web Pass is yet to go live. We checked on Vodafone network using Opera Mini and we could not get pass buying options.
However, Idea Web Pass has already gone live and is available to users to buy.
How To Buy Idea Web Pass
You will need to have Opera Mini installed on your mobile. You will need to point the browser to http://webpass.opera.com/store. idea subscribers will be shown 3 passes which are currently available.
The Daily internet pass costs Rs. 8 and offers 1 day of internet usage with 30mb of data available free of cost. There is a Weekly Facebook pass that offers 7 days of Facebook usage with 70 mb data usage limit. The third pass available is Weekly Internet Pass for Rs. 30 and offers 125 mb of internet usage for a week.
Once you click on “buy” on the web pass that you need, you will need to confirm. You can then start browsing. The bill will be deducted from your prepaid balance.
In my view, the data limit should have been higher. 125MB for 7 days is far too low to do any serious browsing. But one has to also consider that, these passes are aimed at infrequent internet users rather than heavy users.
While, Vodafone has not announced any specific plans as yet, it is expected that they will come up with similarly priced web passes as well.
What do you think? Will you go for such kind of internet usage on your mobile phones. Do drop us comments.
[…] plans rather than more complex volume (GB, MB) based plans. Idea, Vodafone and Airtel had recently joined hands with Opera to offer their “Web Pass” solution that makes it easy for users to subscribe and use fixed time based […]