MTS, which provides CDMA services, has tied up with Vodafone to sell its high speed EVDO dongles in the country. Vodafone which is a GSM operator will sell these dongles through its retail network under the NetCruise brand name.
While the marketing and distribution of NetCruise dongles will be handled by Vodafone with slightly higher tariff than the MTS MBlaze, the network and billing will be provided by MTS (Sistema Shyam).
NetCruise will be available both in postpaid and prepaid plans with postpaid plans starting at Rs 699 (1 GB), going up to Rs 1,299 for unlimited data with a 9 GB fair usage cap (after this speed will go down) for 30 days. There are two more unlimited plans at Rs 799 and Rs 999 with lower fair usage caps of 3.5 GB and 6 GB respectively.
Prepaid plans start at Rs 498 (650 MB for 30 days) and goes up to Rs 998 for unlimited data with 6 GB fair usage cap. There are also Rs 799 and Rs 899 unlimited plans with 3.5 GB and 4.5 GB fair usage cap respectively.
MTS has earlier announced that it will be launching dual mode dongles that will both support GSM and CDMA 3G networks. The announcement did not make sense earlier but now with this partnership in place, the picture is quite clear now.
With this partnership, both MTS and Vodafone can take advantage of each other’s networks as none of them have pan-India high speed network.
If such a dongle is launched Vodafone and MTS customers will have larger number cities where they will be able to enjoy high-speed data access. However, it will depend on agreements of the contract, whether such a deal has been struck between the two operator.