BSNL Dataone - Unofficial FAQ

This page is neither affiliated to nor endorsed by BSNL in anyway.

You can find the official website for the Dataone service here.

This page last updated: Tue May 9 12:35:46 IST 2006

General Security Tips

The following security tips cannot be empahised enough. Any prankster changing your password can deny you broadband access for 24hrs+ (depending on how effectively you can communicate with the drones that answer on 1600-424-1600)

• Change your passwords from the default one that is issued to you and keep changing it regularly. Change your password now!

• If you are using a router based connection please change your router password from the default "admin/admin"

• If you are using pppoe directly on the machine please setup atleast a basic firewall on your machine before you get online.(I believe ZoneAlarm is a good option for windows users. I have never used it myself (refer to disclaimer above!) Linux users can use whatever firewall utility that comes with their distro. I personally use shorewall.)

Usage / Usage Monitoring and Billing issues.

Where can I check my usage?

The usage monitoring service is only accessible when you are on DataOne. It can be accessed at http://10.240.43.216/

What does "Incompatible Explore" "Sorry, IE is needed." mean?

Unfortunately the usage monitoring website is currently geared towards a browser from Microsoft and doesn't work with browsers based on Gecko or Khtml(Mozilla/Safari/Konqueror etc) even with user agent spoofing

But BSNL are working with their vendors on rectifying this and hope to have this fixed by sometime in November 2005

UPDATE: It's still not fixed as of April 2006... nearly 1 year after I first brought it to their notice.

What exactly counts towards the usage limits?

Everything that you do online counts towards your monthtly "transfer" limits, not just the downloads, every webpage you visit, every character you type into an Instant Messenger. Even every worm infected machine on the internet that "tries" to infect your machine counts towards your usage limit.

So if you let you run pppoe on your router instead of your machine, you should make sure it disconnects the ppoe session or power it down when you aren't using it because internet worms continuously probing your router will keep your session alive and use up a part of you bandwidth limit.

I use Linux/*BSD/Mac / don't use MSIE, can I still view the usage ?

Fortunately, the site is "usable" under Opera, you can download it for free for a vareity of operating systems.

For newer versions of opera you'll need to enable User-Agent spoofing and identify your browser as MSIE for the system to work

Can I get the usage details in a standard format(without the fancy html formatting)?

Yes, thanks to how Opera handles tables it is possible to copy the usage records page by page into a spreadsheet. Here's how...

• Select all the records on the current page using your mouse and make sure you also get the first blank cell on the first record. In the image below the right way is circled in green and the wrong way in red.
  
• Open your favorite text editor and turn off line-wrap and paste the selected text into it.
• Repeat previous step for all the multiple pages (depends on how many sessions you had for the month
• Save the file with a .csv extension. eg. data1.csv
• Open the file in a spreadsheet, (You can use OOCalc from OpenOffice.org which is a free download.)
• In the Text Import Dialog, uncheck box next to "comma" and check the box next to "Tab". And click the "OK" button.
• You now have all the records in a spreadsheet to manipulate to your hearts content!
• If you want to add a column of cells say from E1 to E40, move the cursor to an empty cell and type "=SUM(E1:E40)"(without the quotes) and hit enter and that cell will show the total of all values in column "E" from rows 1 to 40.(My knowledge of productivity tools ends here so I can't help you any further!)

For those of you that dislike spreadsheets, here is an awk script with usage instructions that does a lot of funky calculation for you.(Thanks to Prashanth Mohan <prashmohan at gmail dot com>

The usage details mentioned on the site doesn't match my billed usage! What gives?

The data from the usage monitoring site is not the one that is used to calculate your bill. So the two of them won't match. It should only be taken as a guidance on your usage details and not necessarily accurate. I have seen records creep into the usage stats a week or two later!

What causes them to differ?

The usage monitoring site shows your usage month to month, ie., from midnight on the 1st to midnight on the last day of the month, but billing is being calculated based on the cumulative total of all pppoe sessions that ended during a given month.

In other words.. if you got online at 2000hrs on 30th of September and stayed online till 0100hrs on 1st of October, the entire transfer done during that session will be added to the month of October and not to the month of September. Because BSNL's session log would have ended in October.

How can I avoid this ?

Make sure you disconnect your session manually before the end of the month, give atleast 15-20 minutes to compensate for any differences between your clock and BSNL's

What about the free usage periods between 0200hrs and 0800hrs everyday?

Sadly they cannot calculate that either(as yet) If you want to take advantage of the free usage period make sure that your session starts and ends between 0200hrs and 0800hrs.(As usual give or take 15 minutes to compensate for any differences between your clock and BSNL's)

UPDATE: They claim to be able to calculate the free usage without disconnects since sometime in Dec. 2005. But their calculations are way off the mark and even pulling numbers from a hat might have been more accurate. It's still safer to disconnect and reconnect at 0200/0800hrs to ensure that your free usage is really free.

Is it an always on 24/7 service ?

Not really, the maximum a session can last is 24 hours "for accounting purposes" at which point they disconnect your session in such a way that the linux pppd dies without even logging the session/transfer stats.

And if you want to take advantage of the free downloads at night you'll have to disconnect/reconnect more frequently.

BSNL is aware of this and are working to fix all the above usage related issues but it'll be a few months before it's actually implemented/rolled out. I was told not to hold my breath but that it would definitely happen.

So the best it can be is a 18.5+5.5/7 service for now. Which is almost 24/7 but not quite.

Can I independently verify the usage records (other than from the BSNL site)?

Unfortunately thanks to the way BSNL disconnects pppoe sessions every 24 hours, it's not possible to have a user verifiable record to compare with BSNL's.

But If you disconnect the sessions yourself before BSNL gets to kill them, you can get stats logged by pppd

Another option would to use something like vnstat I have been too lazy to configure it on my machine... maybe someday :-)

If you use the BSNL provided router as your gateway and run pppoe on it, you might be able to get some records from it, but I prefer to run pppoe on my linux box as some protocols like h323 are not NAT friendly and others like bittorrent etc are easier to use when the application is exposed to the internet. And I don't really trust the security of the router, so I have been using it only in bridge mode.

I'm currently using a rather crude script running from cron that dumps the interface stats for ppp0 on the hour, every hour. Not very elegant but has been good enough for me to present a case to the folks at BSNL and get my bills adjusted.

What is the problem with the August 2005 bill?(Bill dated xx/Sept/2005)

In a burst of "patriotism" BSNL announced a change in the DataOne billing rates(for extra usage) and introduced the free usage period and switch to billing in arrears in the middle of the month on independence day.

So what did it do to your bill ?

Since you were paying for the broadband service in advance until the bill dated xx/August/2005 you were not charged the basic usage charges for the bill dated xx/Sept/2005 since you had already paid for it the previous month.

But then they seem to have decided to split the monthly usage into two parts of 15 days each and halved the usage limits for that period too! Which means that if you exceeded 50% of your permitted transfer limit in the first 15 days you were charged extra for it at the old rate. And exceeded 50% of your limit in the last 15 days you were billed for the excess transfer at the new rate.

But the downside is that you could have been charged for extra usage for either or both halves even though you never exceeded your monthly transfer limit!

In my case I had done over 50% of my permissible limit in the first half of the month, and in the second half thanks to the "0200-0800hrs free download time" I again did more than 50% of my permissible limit.

While most of you may not have been monitoring/logging your downloads in the free usage time if you have been billed for excess usage for exceeding 50% of permissible usage in either half and yet doing less than 100% of your transfer limit in total you could be eligible for a refund.

Okay even I can't understand the above paragraph on the first read, so here are some examples

Assuming you are on the basic 256kbps plan at Rs.500/month and a 1GB cap and did 600MB between the 1st and the 15th and 350MB between 15th and 31st, your total usage would is 950MB and within permissible limits but you would have been charged for 100MB of extra usage.

Assuming you are on the basic 256kbps plan at Rs.500/month and a 1GB cap and did 600MB between the 1st and the 15th and 550MB between 15th and 31st, of which 250MB was done during the free download period between 0200hrs and 0800hrs your total usage would is 900MB and within permissible limits but you could have been charged for 100MB of extra usage at the old rate and 50MB extra usage at the new rate.

(It isn't that simple since they have done some kind of pro-rata adjustment/discounting to account for the free usage period, but I think my description is as close as one could get to the exact situation)

Please check the usage details available on BSNL's usage monitoring site at http://10.240.43.216/ and if your usage for the month of August is under your permissible limit and yet you have been billed for excess usage, You can contact your local BSNL office and ask for the excess amount paid by you to be adjusted with your next bill

The usage stats for August 2005 will not be available for download on their usage monitoring site after 31st October 2005. So better hurry up.

Other Useful Links

• Appaji has compiled an excellent HOWTO for DataOne users http://appaji.net/stuff/dataone.html
• The Chennai LUG has a wiki that's a must read for linux users with a broadband connection in India http://www.chennailug.org/wiki/BSNL_Broadband