Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), the Indian state-owned telecommunications company is neither known for it's quality of service nor for customer satisfaction. To make their services more user-friendly they started allowing quick online recharge facility from their website, but this service has a data privacy loophole where anybody can check any BSNL subscribers prepaid balance with expiry date. While this may not sound a big security risk the data exposed can be used to device social-engineering phishing attacks, for example - a malicious hacker can fetch this data and utilize it for calling the subscriber as an BSNL employee supplying this information to gain trust of the consumer and asking them to order a highly subsidized online recharge from a fake website.

Majority of high-speed internet service providers have some sort of data-usage caps in their unlimited plans labelled as "Fair Usage Policy (FUP)", where the internet speed is throttled to a lower value after user's high-speed usage quota gets exhausted. Facing tough competition from "You Broadband", India’s largest telecom service provider Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has now announced two plans with truly unlimited broadband usage without any FUP in Surat. The new plans BB Home Combo UL 575 CS20 (costing Rs. 525/- per month) and BB Home Combo UL 725 CS21 (costing Rs. 725/- per month) features downloading speeds of 512 Kbps and 1 Mbps respectively without any maximum usage cap.

Users in many countries are experiencing extremely slow internet connection since past few days, thanks to an major undersea sub-continental cable cut. The most affected countries include India, Pakistan and Egypt where internet connectivity to content hosted in Europe and US is almost unaccessible due to slow speeds.

Egyptian navy has arrested three divers sabotaging the SEA-ME-WE 4 undersea cable - one of the major data traffic route connecting Asia and Europe with 14 countries, running from France to Malaysia and linking Italy, north Africa, the middle east and the south Asia.

The damage to this major data pipe with reportedly two others have cause severe internet speed degradation for users in India, especially for customers of BSNL, MTNL, Bharti Airtel and Tata Communications and are supposed to be disrupted for the next 20-30 days.

While the extent of full damage and situation is still being assessed, Rajesh Chharia, president at Association of Internet Service Providers of India explained :

"Currently, internet and data usage are low because of the festive season. India will feel the impact from Monday when offices and businesses come back. Telcos have diverted all traffic from the Atlantic route to the Pacific, but our connectivity to the latter route is not sufficient to cater to all of India's traffic,"

India's state owned telecommunication service provider BSNL has taken another step towards providing better customer support by urging them to install Motive Smart Self-care Suite which is used by many renowned ISP's all over the globe to provider automated ADSL modem setup, configuration and technician assisted troubleshooting when needed.

Few days ago I shared a post on how to activate and setup BSNL 3G on your mobile phone, however, if you are using Apple iPhone 3G/3GS then sadly BSNL does not provide you any automated method to configure iPhone specific 3G settings, sending an SMS with iPhone as phone model to receive configuration settings result in the reply below.

After lots of tinkering I was able to get BSNL 3G working on my Apple iPhone 3G and surprisingly all it needs is a single APN value to get configured as demonstrated below.

While the auction of 3G spectrum is still to happen for private telecommunication players in India, state owned telecom operator BSNL is slowly rolling out their 3G services across cities and towns across the country. If you are from the lucky few cities and towns where BSNL 3G service is available here are all the information you will need to get started with 3G internet on your supported devices.

Basically, you will be needing a 3G supporting Cellphone or Data-card (eg. Micromax 3G Data-card) with an activated BSNL 3G SIM card with proper recharges to use the service, do keep in mind that you can migrate your existing 2G BSNL SIM-Card to 3G plans with a Re. 1/- recharge but this is not advised as it will wipe-out all your existing enrolled special-tariff schemes and validity promos - you can get a new 3G SIM for just Rs. 59/- and an 3G activation top-up of Rs. 120/- under a special promo till 31-12-09 which also provides you following benefits.

Now this seems too good to be true but India's leading telecom service provider BSNL in association with leading entertainment portal Hungama is offering unlimited music, videos and games download for just Rs. 149/- ($3) per month, the flat-fee legal unlimited download service is accessible to all BSNL Broadband customers and can be activated instantly using existing broadband username and password.

Almost all the latest bollywood music releases are available for instant download and the music-on-demand library is growing daily with new offerings, the service currently offers more then 50,000+ legal music downloads ranging from bollywood movies, albums, gazals and devotional categories to name a few.

India's largest telecommunication's company BSNL is all set to release TV on mobile services, currently offered free for testing as a technology preview the company is already providing 12 TV channels, there are three subscription plans at present: