Funny how the biggest carrier in Laos that has a perfectly functioning corporate website doesn’t provide a basic information like how to enable 3G manually.

At the time of this writing, Unitel of Laos is yet a member of iPhone’s 100+ official carriers. That said, enabling 3G connection on your iPhone needs a little more work than a regular Stupidphone like your old Nokia.

Also at the time of this writing, Unitel offers ambiguous data package for pay-per-usage DM0, 8mb package for 1 week DM5, and 20mb package for 1 month DM10, and so on…

It’s not a typo, but after phone calls and conclusive usage check, indeed their bandwidth standard is measured with megabyte not gigabyte, ambiguous as it is, after using my iPhone for Google Maps and tethering my iPad via Personal Hotspot, a quick usage check [*122#] confirms the ambiguity further, what feels like a two digit megabyte consumption is merely -3000kb off the allowed bandwidth. It means, despite the allocated price and bandwidth, Unitel’s 3G offering is actually priced aggressively compared to other ASEAN carriers.

To activate 3G (GPRS) simply send your preferred package (I chose DM10) to Unitel’s 3G SMS center: Message body: DM10, send to: 111. Go to Settings > General > Network > Cellular Data, and input ‘unitel3g’ on the APN field. If you want to enable personal hotspot, make sure you do the same with ‘Tethering’.

A message will be sent to confirm whether you want to activate, or not. Reply with ‘yes’, and the glorious wait begins.

The wait is arbitrary. Sometimes I’d loose coverage and the 3G will be stalled for 15–20min again before you can use the data again.

But all annoyances aside, having Google Maps in Laos is like Indiana Jones with his whip: we function better as a traveler in a strange town.

UPDATE: Turn out that my purchased SIM has a free data bonus, one simply needs to enter the APN [unitel3] to start using. The occasional drop and slow connection is the result of that being free.

If you run out of the free data, you can subscribe to their 3G packages:

• MI0 – pay per use (default)
• MI5 – 5000kip/day, free 50mb.
• MI15 – 15000kip/month, free 100mb
• MI40 – 40000kip/month, free 500mb
• MI150 – 150000kip/month, free 2GB

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