On August 1 Rostelecom launched mobile service in St. Petersburg. Today I bought a SIM card to play around with.
I signed up for the SIM card at their office on Nevsky. They let me choose a number. The contract was set up fairly quickly. For the iPhone they also gave me a micro-SIM. They also gave me a full-size one, but they just moved everything from it onto a clean micro-SIM. It all cost 100 rubles. The money is immediately on your balance.
I walked out of the office and inserted the SIM. In the screenshots on Habrahabr the operator was shown as RTK-SPB. For some reason mine showed Uraltel instead. But 3G appeared right away.
I measured the speed. City center, Nevsky — not impressive.
Still, I did not get discouraged. I started poking around online — it more or less works. I did not make any calls. I did not send any SMS. The plan description says 9 kopecks per megabyte. Nice and clear. No little asterisks.
I checked the balance and they had already charged almost 5 rubles for something (their balance check, by the way, seems to be *102#, like Beeline).
What for is unclear. I kept browsing and about 5 rubles disappeared again. It feels like the billing is completely different. Are they cheating? I enabled the «Internet with you» option. They charged 30 rubles, but then started charging under that option — 3 rubles per day, 100 MB of traffic per day, after which they simply cap the speed to 64 kbit.
That left an unpleasant aftertaste. There is no way I could have burned through 10 rubles on internet alone without making a single call or sending a single SMS. I would have had to download 100 MB. With the speed my measurement showed.
I walked further along Nevsky and measured the speed again near the House of Cinema. Better already (I forgot to take a screenshot on the phone, luckily I shared it on Twitter):
Well, not bad. The speed certainly jumps around from place to place, but they will improve coverage over time. I managed to watch a one-minute Youtube clip on the first try and buffering was quick; the video did not stutter once.
I sent an SMS just to test it, and they really charged 9 kopecks. Although the balance did not update immediately. Definitely more than a minute.
I stopped torturing the phone after that because the battery was close to zero. I still had not even made a single call.
On the way home I noticed there is no service in the metro. It cuts out on the escalator and after that you are offline. Straight back to the 2000s. Though of course they will fix that. The only question is when.
Unfortunately by the time I got home the phone had completely run out of battery and shut down. It turned out I had lost the plastic card with the PIN code, could not remember it after three tries, and now I will have to go to their office and do some kind of recovery. Annoying. I only managed to notice that at home it showed a full signal bar. Once I get the SIM restored, I will keep testing. I want to use an inexpensive operator with decent mobile internet for a while. Although for now you still cannot read Twitter in the metro with it.