I’ve arrived in Nepal, I’m going to be here for the next 3 months. While here, I’m going to be staying with my wifes family in Kathmandu. I quickly realised that the Internet connection at the house simply was not sufficient. 128kbp or 256kbp, slow as a wet wick. This is through the Nepal Telecom.

You have two options for a 3G network at the roof of the world. NTC or NCELL. I’m told the NTC network coverage is as good as Vodafone in Sydney, pretty abysmal.

Today, with the aid of my trusty uncle, I ventured off to find the local NTC store. Ushered in the door by a burly security guard we quickly established what was needed.

  • 1 Passport photo, they use them for everything here. We had to go to an office down the road to obtain these.
  • A copy of your passport
  • Your grandfathers name. It seems that as part of the verification purpose to set up an account they do need to know your grandpaps full name.
  • Left and right thumbprint

I expect in the years to come I’ll also need to deed over my first borns soul.

Anyhow, I paid 10GB for about 3k rupees, the equivilant of $30 AUD. It runs out in 30 days. I never thought I’d come across a network as shady as Telstra.