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Lebara roaming in India: data mostly broken, use local SIM instead
Prior to a long stay in India I ordered a SIM with Lebara because they offer roaming access in India. Sounded good and I can't fault delivery and using it here in the UK.
FF to India and it turns out that the Lebara SIM did (mostly) work for voice and texting but not at all reliably for data. Data worked OK in Delhi, didn't work in most of Uttar Pradesh (not in Agra but Varanasi was fine, go figure), not in Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha, Telangana... where I even stopped checking.
(I repeatedly did the steps recommended by the Lebara website and also tried the SIM in another phone, but the SIM would just not work for data. Lebara CS wasn't helpful either, they don't accept that there is a problem and only refer to their web pages.) After some more searching I found quite a few non-Lebara pages on the web which explained that a Lebara SIM would only work for towers/masts from Vodafone India but not with towers/masts from Idea (a company Vodafone India has merged with a good while ago to form Vodafone Idea). This is clearly a well-known and well-documented problem and I find it amazing and unacceptable that Lebara will sell SIMs with the promise that they'll work all over India when they are clearly not working in more than a handful of locations, albeit some of the bigger cities are OK.)
In UP I decided to buy a local SIM (I could and perhaps should have bought one in Delhi Airport, where they are used to foreigners but there and then I still thought Lebara would be fine).
I went with airtel which worked fabulously, 28 days with 1.5GB data per day (no typo) for RS400 for the first 4 weeks and RS300 for further 4 week periods. An airtel SIM seems to be the best bet for foreigners as many branches are willing to deal with visitors although it pays to persevere and to have a local contact (eg hotel manager) to smooth things out (airtel have an automated activation procedure which is not easy to navigate for non-Hindi speaking foreigners :-/).
Very disappointed with Lebara and have cancelled my account.
FF to India and it turns out that the Lebara SIM did (mostly) work for voice and texting but not at all reliably for data. Data worked OK in Delhi, didn't work in most of Uttar Pradesh (not in Agra but Varanasi was fine, go figure), not in Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha, Telangana... where I even stopped checking.
(I repeatedly did the steps recommended by the Lebara website and also tried the SIM in another phone, but the SIM would just not work for data. Lebara CS wasn't helpful either, they don't accept that there is a problem and only refer to their web pages.) After some more searching I found quite a few non-Lebara pages on the web which explained that a Lebara SIM would only work for towers/masts from Vodafone India but not with towers/masts from Idea (a company Vodafone India has merged with a good while ago to form Vodafone Idea). This is clearly a well-known and well-documented problem and I find it amazing and unacceptable that Lebara will sell SIMs with the promise that they'll work all over India when they are clearly not working in more than a handful of locations, albeit some of the bigger cities are OK.)
In UP I decided to buy a local SIM (I could and perhaps should have bought one in Delhi Airport, where they are used to foreigners but there and then I still thought Lebara would be fine).
I went with airtel which worked fabulously, 28 days with 1.5GB data per day (no typo) for RS400 for the first 4 weeks and RS300 for further 4 week periods. An airtel SIM seems to be the best bet for foreigners as many branches are willing to deal with visitors although it pays to persevere and to have a local contact (eg hotel manager) to smooth things out (airtel have an automated activation procedure which is not easy to navigate for non-Hindi speaking foreigners :-/).
Very disappointed with Lebara and have cancelled my account.
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