Hey everybody.
We were supposed to do an experiment last week. You know, the one with the Glo nationwide hotspot? I spent the better part of last week trying to figure out how to get the new data sharing feature to work, but no dice. I finally gave up and went to the Glo customer care for help. After minutes of making me speak technobabble, and some frenzied gesturing at my laptop (which they made me bring out to describe what the problem was), they finally told me the bad news.
The data sharing feature doesn’t work yet.
I’m like “what???” So why announce it in the first place?
They started to give me some story about it not being ready yet, last minute stuff, blah blah. At this point I’d stopped listening. I was already thinking about the headline for this post. But when I fired up my computer to write it, I thought I should make absolutely sure that it really doesn’t work — never mind that Glo customer care had just told me it didn’t. As it turns out, another blogger said he’d activated it, and I called him up so we could figure out why I couldn’t.
The reason was simple – data sharing only works with data plans from Always Min and above. I was doing my initial testing with the SIM I use on my phone, which is subscribed to Always Micro.
Here’s the Glo HSI portal on the SIM that’s subscribed to Always Micro. Here, there’s no option to share.
Now I’m on Always Max, and the feature becomes active.
So there you have it. Data sharing works. But only on the 4GB Always Min data plan and above. No sharing for data tiers below Always Min. Apparently, the Glo customer dolts didn’t know this, so they figured they’d just tell me it doesn’t work.
Apart from the lack of detailed instructions on how to work this thing, there’s also no way to enable data sharing directly from mobile devices, you have to do it from a PC. Oh wait, apparently there is, but from what I could deduce from the drivel that’s supposed to explain how to do that, it’ll only work on Android devices.
The moral of the story. Glo can’t do lucid documentation, even if their lives were on the line. You have to figure out everything by yourself, and hope you don’t waste too much money and time while you’re at it. And never, ever believe what Glo customer care tells you — 80 percent of the time they have no freakin’ clue.
Now that safely behind us, it’s back to the data sharing experiment. For those who are interested, here’s how to participate.
