Stupid Tip: What you could do when BSNL Broadband is down

My BSNL Broadband has recently been going down ever so often. It's been getting quite frustrating and any attempt to call the BSNL office doesn't really help, though the connection would be up after a little while.

One thing I noticed though was that after I made a call to the BSNL office (from my BSNL landline), the ADSL connection would be up again. At the time I just thought that the BSNL guys just fixed it.

Today morning, the ADSL connection was down again and I had no patience to call the BSNL office again; So what did I do?

I just picked up my BSNL landline for about 15 seconds and then voila! the ADSL connection was up again. Now I am yet to get a technical answer for what just happens, but for now I just think it's stupid. It works for me everytime and should be OK with me, atleast until the connection is fixed properly again.

Next time you face the same problem, try the above and let me know if it works.

UPDATE:
As promised, I found the technical answer for the problem here.

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Play great games with BSNL Games On Demand (BETA)

If you got a BSNL Broadband connection, then you've got to try the BSNL Games On Demand (BETA).

BSNL Games On Demand (BETA) is a great service that offers great games to play at an affordable price, making the most of your BSNL Broadband connection.

Though the collection of games offered is not that great, it still has some great favorites and they are updating their service with the latest games regularly.

Try out BSNL Games On Demand (BETA) today! Click here to visit their homepage.

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Run a Broadband Speed Test (India)

To run a speed test of your broadband connection (in India only), visit the Broadband India - Internet Speedtest Centre. This test will give you your true connection speed, your download speed and a comparative diagram of your connection speed compared to other connections.

To get a more informative speed test, visit Speedtest.net Mini Bandwidth Speed Test. This test will give you your true download and upload speed in kbps.

NOTE: Don't browse the internet or download any files while running the speed test. It is recommended to restart your system and run the speed test before you do any other tasks.

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Configure BSNL DataOne Broadband & uTorrent for portforwarding

uTorrent is the torrent software of choice since it's fast, lite and simple to use. To make the most of uTorrent portforwarding has to be configured properly. If not, your IP is not visible to outside peers.

BSNL DataOne Broadband is not the easiest to configure portforwarding though. With the UT Starcom UT300R2U modem it is a bit tricky. Here is how to configure portforwarding for BSNL DataOne Broadband and uTorrent.

Step 1:
Even though your IP address is dynamic, the ADSL router would always assign an IP address to your computer. Most probably it would be 192.168.1.2.

Go to Start -> Run. Type cmd or in Vista, type cmd in search and press enter.

At the command prompt type 'ipconfig' (without the quotes) and press enter.

You should get some information about your Ethernet card, IP Address etc. Note the IP address of your computer.

Step 2:
Open uTorrent and go to Options -> Preferences.

Select Connection and under Listening Port, set Port used for incoming connections to somewhere between 40000 and 65000. Also uncheck Enable UPnP port mapping.

Next select Bandwidth. Set the Maximum upload rate to somewhere between 14-16 kB/s and Set the Maximum download rate to 0.

Step 3:
Open your browser and type in the address http://192.168.1.1
You will be asked for a username and password. By default, in most cases, this the username will be 'admin' and password will be 'admin' (both without the quotes).

You will get a neat interface of your router. Select Advanced Setup from the menu on the left. You should get a submenu under Advanced Setup. Select NAT from this submenu and then DMZ Host. DMZ host refers to Demilitarized Zone.

Enter your IP Address that you found in Step 1 there and click Save/Apply.

Thats it. You're done.

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Optimize your BSNL DataOne Broadband connection

As with anything related to computers, your Internet connection too can be tweak to get that extra bit of speed that can enhance your broadband experience.

SG TCP Optimizer is a useful program to tweak TCP and IP related parameters in Windows Registry to speed up Internet speed.

No matter what type of Internet connection you have, whether it’s cable modem connection, DSL connection, lease line or dial up connection (28.8/56k), this program will improve your connection performance after the tweaking.

It takes into account all related RFCs, the Microsoft TCP/IP implementation oddities, verifies all Registry locations for the same TCP/IP parameters (ICS Sharing, AOL protocol MTU, etc) and only adds the necessary Registry parameters during tweaking process.

It does support Windows 9x, ME, 2000, XP, XP SP2 and 2003. Most likely you can find it to support Vista soon.

Download Page:
http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php
Direct Link:
http://www.speedguide.net/files/TCPOptimizer.exe

Before you use the program, you need to find out your connection speed. Use the SG Speed Test to find your true connection speed. Please use the closet mirror to your location to do the test; this will ensure that you will get optimum results in the end.

The test should give you 2 figures in it's test results: Download speed and Upload speed, both in Kbps. As a thumb rule, your connection speed is the closet Kbps/Mbps of the download speed.

For eg: In the above screenshot, the download speed is 359 Kbps. So in SG TCP Optimizer we're going to select 256 Kbps as our connection speed.

If your connection speed is in Mbps, then just multiply 1000 to the figure you get from the download speed test results to make it as Kbps. For example, 1 Mbps is 1000 Kbps and 3 Mbps is 3000 Kbps.

Now that we know our connection speed, start SG TCP Optimizer and set the connection speed slider to that matches your connection speed.

Proceed to tick Modify All Network Adapters, and then select Optimal settings to tweak to optimal settings automatically. Finally click Apply changes.

Tick the Backup option to backup existing registry settings and click OK, after that reboot the computer.

Note: Before applying the changes, you can always go to File and select backup current settings, so that you can have options to restore backup settings or Restore Windows Default settings later.

Thats it. You're done.

Note: If you don’t feel satisfied about the result by using Optimal settings, you can always select custom settings to do manual tweaking. Read this TCP Optimizer Help to understand more about TCP/IP settings and other program features you can play with before doing manual tweaking.

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Configure BSNL DataOne Broadband

BSNL DataOne Broadband brought the Internet Broadband revolution to India, but with brought a lot of problems which hampered the experience.

The most common of these problems were failed connections at random times and most of us end up calling BSNL Customer Care to get this resolved. In this post I will show you how you can do this yourself. I will refering to the UT Starcom UT300R2U here as this is the modem I have.

Open your browser and type in the address http://192.168.1.1
You will be asked for a username and password. By default, in most cases, this the username will be 'admin' and password will be 'admin' (both without the quotes).

You will get a neat interface of your router. Select Advanced Setup from the menu on the left. You should get a submenu under Advanced Setup. Select WAN from this submenu.

This should load up a page with a list of records. Find the record with 0/35 and click Edit.

Click Next. In the next page, make sure PPPoE is selected and click Next.

On the next page enter your username and password and click Next. Finally click Save. This should take you back to the main Advanced Setup -> WAN page. Click Save/Reboot on this page and wait for the page to refresh (this should take 2 minutes).

You're done.

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