Etisalat jumps on clue train with an OK mobile broadband package

Etisalat has upgraded its mobile broadband internet packages, and has actually come out with a fairly decent deal.

The highlight of the update is a price/download limit combo that is pretty close to the sweet spot - Dh295 for 5 gigabytes of downloads.

Five gigs is enough to browse constantly on an iPhone for a month, and even enough for a home connection if you stay away from the movie downloads and streaming TV. And the price isn't bad, by "UAE prices" at least. My thoughts on the whole situation, a full comparison of the new / old prices and the full Etisalat press release, after the jump:



Etisalat's mobile broadband packages have always had a strangely unbalanced quality to them, with data plans moving in a funny progression: 2 megabytes (good for perhaps 3 minutes of web browsing), then 50, 100, 200, and then...drumroll... 10 gigabytes.

If you were looking for a package with a download limit somewhere in the 9800 megabytes in between, tough luck. The prices also had a jumpy quality: Dh25 for 2 meg (the "suckers" package, I believe it was called), Dh95 for 50, Dh195 for 100, Dh295 for 200, then Dh460 for the ten gig package, which was really the only package to be taken seriously if you intended on actually surfing the web.

The new packages still have the same jumpiness, and the sucker package is still there (Dh25 for 10 megs and Dh15 for every extra meg above the limit). The company is clearly freaked out about people using lots of mobile broadband, because the top of the line 10-gigabyte package has a pretty serious condition attached - sure, the first ten gigs cost you Dh460, but the next gigabyte over the limit will be charged at a cool Dh30,000.

Anyhow, the new/old pricing is below - and if you want to read up some more, here is the Etisalat press release.