Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
On Monday 23 March 2009 08:42:59 Dinesh A. Joshi wrote:
Recommendations are welcome.
this is a silly question. 'Good ISP' is an oxymoron. If you cannot live with Indian ISPs, live without internet. And I fail to see how MTNL can screw up a set up. My wife is totally non technical, but she lives with Linux and BSNL - all it takes is patience and extensive use of the phone.
You may be lucky but everyone is not so. The tech. guys at MTNL/BSNL know how the system works and are good at setup. However technical troubleshooting is a weak area and thats where it gets frustrating if anything stops working. Its worse if it is intermittent.
In my own case when I changed back plans and bandwidth after a past blunder of trying out MTNL's iptv, my authentication would not happen. The problem was that the pppoe could not find an access concentrator at the mtnl end. Inspite of describing the actual problem to them they kept wasting time in standard replies and procedures. Finally they triumphantly declared that my modem was bad. I reminded them that it was theirs and let them cross check with another one. After that they found out that instead of changing my bandwidth, the server guys had closed my account on the Access Concentrator back end.
With BSNL I had a frustrating experience at a client's place outside Mumbai city. We wanted to convert the wireless ADSL given by BSNL from pppoe dialup to an independent router. There was a mistake on the client's part too which I discovered after 4 hours there. The password would not get accepted in the pppoe connection and we kept going around in circles with the BSNL guys. The call would break so many times when calling the support center. Every time they gave different replies and the best one was from the local guy who set it up. He said that for a Rs. 250/- subscription we could use only one pc via dialup. To use it as a router we needed a minimum 750/- subscription. Finally it was found that out of 3 service passwords, the client changed one and forgot about it. This was discovered when we used another machine to log into their account and change passwords. Earlier since 2 passwords were correct we did not check the third and that was the trouble one. Finally I downloaded a password cracker from the net and recovered his password (xpee) from the sole dialup machine and the router was up in 5 minutes.
For DJ's place considering other ISP problems, he will need to be patient with MTNL and get the issue resolved. After that its bliss again.