Recently in Chennai, BSNL has changed their billing system from Landline CTBS to GSM billing system. Which means if you pay your current/next bill under regular landline CTBS counter, your subscription won’t be updated and will be manually transferred to GSM billing system. And so there will be a delay during the period of transition. So tha might end up in disconnection of internet unless you contact some customer service executive and get it fixed.

So to over come this issue, vaithy (our forum member, who reported this) has a suggest for all Chennai customers. To read the suggest to overcome this issue, head over to this thread.

Finally after more than 2 years, BSNL has officially started advertising their EVDO service on their homepage. Eventually, they start broadcasting commercials on televisions, but before doing that they want to give out hot cakes to their customers and existing users!

After creating a lot of confusion amongst their customers by introducing/changing new tariff structures, now apparently they have come up with a rigid decision with irresistible offer. Before if you had to buy a new connection, you had several options (which were really confusing), but now they have 2 single plan and they are “Post paid” and “Pre-paid”.

Back in Nov 2009, I had posted about the hike in Unlimited plan, where they hiked it to Rs. 999 per month and then in the same month, they withheld the hike. So now I believe that they are going to hike it to Rs. 999 again for sure. But before hiking, BSNL has given out an offer which is like “it’s now or never”.

Can’t wait to read? Here it is:
You can now get a new connection at Rs. 700 per month with Unlimited bandwidth and comes with all India roaming enabled. And what’s more, you even get Rev A device which gives you 3.1 Mbps speed instead of 2.4 Mbps! There is no catch, no nothing. But the deadline is March 31st 2010!

Those who all get the new connection before this date will get all these with no additional costs like extra rental for roaming and change of devices now and then blah blah. Even existing rental users can get benefited with this offer by abandoning their existing device and connection and get it newly once again with the new sophisticated device with mouthwatering tariff structure and whole lot of features at just Rs. 700! Now I guess this is news that everyone would like to hear. So get it while it’s hot!

If you want information on where to buy the device and to know few things before buying, please read this post before you pool-in your hard earned money. If you want to see their promo ad, go here.

I’m quoting vaithy’s post from the forum:

There are some good news for the old EVDO users and there are some bad news for the new users who are yet to take connection. Let us see the good news.. those who are paying Rs.550/ will have to shell out additional 100/- in their monthly bill.. provided they completed six months activation ..W.e.f 01-03-10 they will have to pay Rs.650/- (other circles users are already paying Rs.650/- so there is no increase for them..

The bad news is,
If you are a new user activating the card between 01-03-10 and 31-03-10 then will have to pay the monthly rental charges of Rs.750/-
and worse case is, users who are activating the cards after 31-03-10 have to pay Rs 999/- as monthly rental
Please see the attachment and post your comment.
Thanks

To download the attachment and discuss, visit the original thread over here.

Quoting from the official site:

* Existing EVDO customers would continue to avail the unlimited data usage@Rs 650 per month

This means, all existing users can continue enjoying unlimited internet at Rs. 650 per month. However the asterisk sign in the very beginning of that sentence also says that it might be for a time being. And they might increase the unlimited tariff for existing customers as well.

To conclude, it will be good for both BSNL and as well as its existing customers as far the price for unlimited tariff remains the same. If they still have future ideas of hiking for their valuable existing customers, they will definitely lose some of their customers in very short period of time.

I would like to thank ashish_evdo for updating us with the news and dark_king for bringing this into my concern via his BSNL-EVDO-CLUB SMS Channel.

There was a rumor/news/buzz going on in our forum regarding the discontinuation of Unlimited plan on EVDO service. It has created a stir in the existing customers, and many are even planning to move on to some other ISP. And it was confirmed that BSNL has brought some new changes in it’s EVDO tariff after some customers got a notification stating the change in plans and regarding the Unlimited plan and even BSNL published the new plan on their site to fuel the fire.

So I decided to get the official news straight from the BSNL and sent a mail to JTO in Bangalore who is in charge of EVDO service. He is friendly and is in touch with me since I started this website and forum. After exchanging some mails, I’ve gathered the official news here in this post. Hope you all find it useful.

I have got a good news and a bad news for ‘all’ BSNL EVDO users in India. Let me start with the bad news first. (will be bitter for existing users).

Earlier BSNL had just one unlimited plan in its EVDO service ever since they started it. But now for some reasons (I’ll tell you why) it has split the service into different plans and introduced 5 new tariffs for its customers. Thankfully it has retained its unlimited plan, but now it comes at a cost higher than before. All these 5 plans is effective from November 1st of this year. Here’s how the new tariff is like:

Via the official BSNL site.

From Nov 1, all users will be automatically moved on to the Rs 999.00 Unlimited plan by default . Users can then switch to different plans of their choice by submitting a request in change of plan at their nearest telephone exchange.

Now the good news is that BSNL is upgrading the network from Rev 0 to Rev A EVDO technology. This means you get speeds up to 3.1 Mbps over the conventional 2.4 Mbps. And added to this, BSNL will shortly enable all India roaming (National Roaming) (technical work is almost over, testing is in progress)in 1 – 2 months with no additional cost.

While this is one reason for the hike in price, another reason is to reduce the load on their network and hence to reduce the bottleneck in the data flow. This thus increases the overall performance of the stability and speed. This will be possible because there will be less simultaneous logins, since many people will switch to/prefer limited data plans.

Sooner or later, the existing customers will have get their device exchanged after BSNL upgrades their network to Rev A. This is because the old devices do not support Rev A technology. New users need not worry about this. However BSNL will notify you to get your device exchanged to switch to Rev A network after the upgrade work is finished in your circle.

Well to conclude, Rs. 999.00 for Unlimited plan is steep. Considering the quality of service now available in most parts of the country, it is expensive. Only urban customers will get good quality in service after upgrading to the Rev A technology. Apart from that, this is the only service which will satisfy the needs of people who are in constant move and for those who do not have cable (ADSL)  internet in their area, since it offers good network coverage and unlimited usage at considerable price tag.

Once again, I would like to thank the JTO of Bangalore for giving out such a great information to me. And to all those who have questions in their mind, can drop in their queries in this thread in our forum rather than posting a comment here, because the chances of getting reply here in comments is very bleak. Happy surfing.

Take a poll:

To avail this service, you will have to get your device reconfigured at your nearest BSNL Telephone exchange. This information is from a Bangalore user in our forum. If you are living in some other city, please make a query about the reconfiguration for National Roaming facility (be specific about roaming) at your nearest exchange.

Thanks to jameandrew for this information. You can discuss more about this news over here.

If you consider this hike as a bad news, you might be wrong. BSNL will soon enable Roaming facility for this service. So that you can use this device in other cities all over India where the service is available without any extra charges.

Thanks to one of our member for updating us about this news in this thread. You can use the same thread for the rest of the discussion.

So in order to continue using EVDO (2.4 Mbps) service in Bangalore, users have to get their device reconfigured at their nearest BSNL telephone exchange. Getting your device reconfigured is free and may take few hours (if the person in charge of the duty is busy).

If you are using CDMA 1x (144 Kbps) service, you don’t have to reconfigure your device.

Thanks to our members, jameandrew and shaaradu for sharing the information regarding the change in main exchange and PRL.

If you still have any doubt, please feel free to post a question in this thread.

Most people, including me were frustrated with the outage. When I made contact with Customer Care officials, they said it’s sorted out. But it wasn’t for me. And it grew my impatience more and made me to contact once again. This time, they said the issues has been sorted out only in few areas and hung up!

After all this I created a thread in the forum seeking for replies from other Bangalore users and found that most people are facing the issue and few were not. So I thought to wait for few more days and planned to go to my exchange office and make a query.

But the issue was solved sooner and better. After this outage, I can see the increase in speed and stability. The reason for this outage is unknown. But I think there was either some maintenance work done all those days or some upgradation work.

Anyway, the EVDO is now up in Bangalore after a week and half outage. Happy Browsing!

The information you are about to read in this post is gathered officially from BSNL Officer.

According to the official report, BSNL EVDO Coverage has been extended to whole of Bangalore. And the number of BSNL EVDO Towers in Bangalore is extended to 43 out of which 38 has been already established. And other remaining will be established in few weeks. We came to know that 1 tower requires almost a week or more to be completed. Technically, a tower is called as BTS or Base Transceiver Station. To know more about BTS, click here to read the wikipedia article. One BSNL EVDO BTS is capable of transmitting single over 5 – 8 kilometer in Radius. And meanwhile, few areas in Bangalore, where the Installation is still under progress may affect browsing speeds and connection stability for 1 – 2 Hours daily for a week.

And yet another good news is that the 4 Southern States, namely Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andra Pradesh and Kerala will be connected to much more efficient server which is located in Bangalore. There are hopes that this powerful server will break the bottle-neck and improve the data transfer speeds.

Coming back to BTS in Bangalore, we have also received the locations of BSNL EVDO Towers in Bangalore, which are already established (38 BTS). We will list down only the major areas, because as it is known that 1 BTS is able to transmit signal over 5 – 8 KM in radius:

The major areas are:

1. Sandhya Lodge, Near Majestic.
2. Sona Towers, Near Indian Express.
3. City Exchange, Near Market.
4. Malleshwaram Exchange.
5. Kormangala Exchange.
6. BTM Layout Exchange.
7. RT Nagar Exchange.
8. Kengeri.
9. K.R Puram Exchange.
10. Electronic City.
11. Padmanabanagar.
12. Yelahanka.
13. SanjayNagar Exchange.
14. Peenya Exchange, Jalahalli Cross.
15. HSR Layout Exchange.
16. Mysore Road Exchange.
17. Vijaynagar Exchange.
18. Yeshwanthpur Exchange.
19. Kumaraswamy Layout.
20. T John college

If you want the exact location which is not listed in this post, you can consider registering in our forum for free and tell us the area you live in and the major areas around you, then we will tell the nearest exchange to you. To do that, post your query in this thread (after free registration).

Discuss this post….

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Source: Officially gathered from the BSNL Officer.

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