‘Gift a broadband’ with BSNL! No charges for first month! No installation charges!

BSNL Bangalore is offering a scheme for celebrating Christmas & New year called ‘Gift a Broadband…’. You can just walk in to any BSNL customer service center & purchase a Greeting Card enclosed with gift voucher to avail a new broadband connection. This greeting card costs you just Rs.100.  Following are the benefits user who applies for new broadband gets using this scheme:

• Free Broadband Starter Plan (Rs.250) for a month
• No rental on modem for a month (Rs.80)
• No installation charges (Rs.250)

So total value is Rs.580 & you are paying only Rs.100. This scheme is valid only till 31st Jan 2010 & user has to apply for broadband within that date.

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BSNL has reduced usage charges for broadband plan Convinence 250. Updated plan details below:

Monthly Charges: Rs.250

Free Usage: 1 GB

Usage beyond free usage: Rs. 0.5/Mb (Discounted from Rs. 0.9 per MB)

As ususal, modem charges & landline charges are extra. You can view the complete plan details about the plan here.

BSNL Bangalore announced discounts on monthly charges for EVDO & NIC cards for existing Broadband users paying more than Rs.499 every month. Monthly charge for EVDO connection for normal customers is Rs.550, but it is just Rs.300 under this offer. Similarly monthly charges for NIC card connection is Rs.250 & discounted price is Rs.150. These discounts are applicable for one year & after that period you will have to pay the normal charges. You need to also keep your existing broadband connection & should be paying atleast Rs.499 to be eligible for this offer. In case if you discontinue your Broadband connection in between, you have to pay the normal charges. So, basically these are addon plans for BSNL Broadband users to enable mobility.

BSNL EVDO connection seem to be pretty good with city wide coverage & providing speeds upto 2.4 Mbps. As per the experienced users you can get 2mbps speed when you are close to the tower & around 1mbps when bit far away from tower. The big plus of EVDO plan from BSNL is, it’s unlimited!

For more details about these discounted plans check these docs from BSNL Bangalore website: EVDO Plan, NIC Card Plan. For more details on EVDO cards, coverage & help queries you can check out my friend GigaCore’s blog & forum bsnlevdoclub.com.

Recently, from almost a month SMSs from Banks, Service Providers, Companies have started prefixing something like ID, AT, VK…etc. What’s all this after all!!? Here I am to explain you what it is! Normally these SMSs originates from a Bulk SMS provider where you can use 11 digit Alpha-Numeric characters as "Sender". But there were some security risks in this method. I was able to give a phone number as "Sender" & it appears as that person at the recipient end. Basically there was a chance to send SMSs as a different person! I was actually using this to fool my friends.

But the new TRAI regulation insisted bulk SMS providers to restrict the "Sender ID" to 8 characters. Other three characters should be used to specify who is the service provider & where it’s originated from. Say for example: HDFCBANK sends an SMS to you using bulk SMS provider located at Tamil Nadu which uses Airtel. You will receive it as AT-HDFCBANK. First character specifies which service provider the message is being originated & the second character specifies from which location it’s originated. Here is the table which has details of these SMS codes:

Service Provider Codes:

So, combination of these two constitutes the first two digit of ?Sender? followed by an hyphen (-) & actual sender name.

Few people use PIN locking system to lock their phone to avoid un-authorised access. Though this is a good option, it pisses you off sometime. Three wrong entry of PIN code will result in SIM blocking. Once SIM gets blocked, phone starts asking PUK code to enter. If you again enter wrong code for three times, SIM gets completely blocked. You have to walk into your service provider outlet to get a replacement SIM card.

PUK code is a SIM specific code assigned by your service provider. No way you can guess & enter it. So, when it asks for the PUK code, don’t do anything, get the PUK code from your service provider. Airtel has a easier way of getting PUK code. For getting PUK code of a Airtel number, send PUK<space>PhoneNumber to toll free number 121. You can make use of any other Airtel number to send this message since your SIM might have been blocked already.

If the above method doesn’t works or your service provider is not Airtel, call to customer care using any other mobile phone which uses the same service provider. They will ask some details about you to make sure you are the owner of the SIM card. Questions might include your billing address, email ID, numbers you recently called or messaged etc. They might even ask you number printed on the SIM card, so be prepared with all details before calling them. Once you get the PUK code, enter it into the phone & your phone will return to normal.

BSNL has reduced charges for Home Unlimited Dataone Broadband plans. And in addition to that it also introduced two unlimited plans with 512 kbps speed. Home 900 & Home 900 PLUS now has become Home 750 & Home 750 PLUS. As the name of the plan indicates, charges are reduced from Rs.900 to Rs.750. Here is the new tariff table:

Note:
For Home Plan UL 750 Plus & UL 1350 Plus: Telephone fixed monthly charges per month- Nil, Free Calls- Nil, MCU charges per Pulse @ Rs. 1/- shall be applicable. The calls shall be charged as per pulse rate of BSNl Bfone General Plan. Security Deposit and Installation charges as applicable for Local/STD/ISD shall be taken from new customers.

For Home Plan UL 750 & UL 1350 : Fixed monthly Charges for telephone, Free Calls & MCU charges per pulse shall be as per existing plan of the customer.

For details on other tariff plans http://www.bsnl.co.in/service/dataone_tariff.htm

For Existing Customers:

Existing customers has to do nothing! Peacefully browse internet at home. Tariff for esisting Home 900 & Home 900 PLUS customers will be automatically changed to Home 750 & Home 750 PLUS respectively applicable from the month of April.

Operator logo will be displayed on the mobile screen.By default it will show operator name ex: Airtel, Hutch..etc. You can display other images or text as operator logo instead of name of operator by installing new logo. There are many web sites providing operator logos, just google it.But what I tend to explain here is removing logo part completely. You might have experienced a problem while using any celebrity wallpapers on your mobile, where logo displayed almost on face of celebrity which is disturbing. You can remove operator logo by installing a blank logo. From your mobile wap browser goto address http://victorynet.de/wap/betreiberlogos.wml and install blank logo. Now goto your phones display settings & check for “Operator Logo” option, set operator logo ON. It makes blank logo as on & displays nothing. If you make it OFF, operator name will be displayed.

Dataone Usage Finder Ver. 1.5:
Only the monthly total of the bandwidth used is provided on the BSNL
website. There is no provision for knowing the daily total. Also there
is no demarcation between free time usage and paid time usage. These
are the very figures a user would be most interested in.
This program uses IE5 or higher, to fetch pages from the BSNL site, and
after parsing out the required records, presents them in a manner which
is more helpful. This data can also be saved as html files.

http://duf.sourceforge.net/

Note: As this application uses data from the BSNL website to show your
usage details, it CANNOT be used to track if BSNL is billing erronously.

Update:

I myself using this software now & its really great. The best feature I think is it generates an approx bill according to dataone plan you are using. It has presets for all plans to calculate your approx bill. It also gives daily hours of usage & transfer, you can check for any date. Everything will be presented in bar graphs which is very good.

To activate GPRS on BSNL Cell One connection sms GPRS to 3733 or call 9400024365.
For more details Click Here. I don’t know any details on Charges.