An interesting experience. I’m at the Savelovsky market. I need to connect my two tablets to the internet. In two buildings, where electronics are sold, I barely found a place selling SIM cards – it’s a real rarity (going out to the metro was inconvenient and far). Found Yota cards at “Startmaster.” The complete setup took 1 hour 15 minutes (!) and 1000 rubles (500 each).
Firstly, you can’t buy a card without registering it. The registration has to be done only on the devices where they will be used. To register, you need apps from the app store/market, but to download them, you need the internet. To have the internet, you need either an un-purchased card (oops) or Wi-Fi. The sellers don’t have Wi-Fi. I shared the internet from my phone. For registration, you need the Yota/Megafon network. It doesn’t catch inside the store, so you need to go outside. Additionally, you need to manually configure something called an access point in Yota – the sellers went to look up the settings on the Yota website. The apps connect to Yota servers intermittently.
Now I understand why no one sells Yota cards there. But I still don’t understand why they don’t sell ready-to-use kits from other providers.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 