Tuesday, March 16, 2010

BSNL 3G in Chennai on a Samsung SGH-i780

I got myself a BSNL 3G sim in Chennai. This was a prepaid card for Rs 180/- and had Rs 20/- worth of talktime on it.
Getting it to work was an adventure worth blogging!
I have a Samsung SGH-i780 Windows Mobile Phone with 3G. When I called up the customer care of BSNL, the lady at the other end asked me what phone I had. When I gave her the model number, she said shes never heard of it and wouldnt know if my phone would work!
I then turned to my good ole friend Mr Google. Surprisingly, the community around this is very large. There were people running the 3G service on their iPhones (jailbroken), and other such phones.
I got the information I needed in a matter of minutes. The steps are:-
a) Change the band in the phone's settings to WCDMA. This can be found under "Settings" --> "Phone" --> "More" --> "Band Selection"
Once I did this, I got a warning that wcdma works only in 3G coverage areas!
The moment I did this, I got a large 3G icon on the top status bar of the phone.

b) The next step was to set up the data service. For this I navigated to
"Settings" --> "Connections" ---> "Connections" ---> "Manage Existing Connections" --> "My WAP Networks"
c) Create New Connection by clicking on New in the "Modems" tab.
d) Enter a Name for the connection: "BSNL 3G"
e) Select a Modem: Cellular Line (GPRS)
f) Click Next
g) Access Point Name: "gprssouth.cellone.in"
h) Click Next
i) Leave all the fields in this screen blank (User Name, Password, Domain)
j) Click on Finish.

Open up Pocket Internet Explorer and type in any url say www.google.com
You can see the 3G data connection getting setup. once this happened, I got a small 3G icon sitting atop my signal indicator icon.

Voila... Im connected on 3G!!!

I tried the speed test at speedtest.dslreports.com/m and it showed an amazing 1mbps!
Youtube plays without buffering.
Way to go BSNL; if only they got their act together. I cannot seem to find out where and how to recharge the SIM. The call center lady asks me to go to ezreharge.in but they dont have BSNL as an option!!
But I am so glad that 3G has finally come into the country and it works well too!

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