Jalaj P. Jha

I recently met Ashish Dave, a Marketing and Management Consultant and CEO of Satyam Marketing Company, while he was on his week long holiday. When we were talking about Management he told me how Lord Krishna was the Greatest Manager of all times. I asked him if he could manage some time to write this down for me to post it as a Guest Post on my Blog. He gladly agreed and it was then that I asked him if he could occasionally write for his own blog that I would set up and initially manage. He accepted and thus started satyammktg.wordpress.com. The post that I initially planned for guest post here now appears on the new blog.

While there would be more of posts on Marketing coming up there, don’t forget to read the first post Lord Krishna - The Greatest Manager

Do you believe in the title? If yes, you might not have ever worked on PHP. When I started learning Web Development in 2001, I badly needed to move ahead of boring static pages and wanted to learn Dynamic page generation. Obvious answer was ASP as there were a lot of books available on it, but problem was that the Personal Web Server that came with Windows 95 did not support ASP. Win 95 in 2001 sounds absurd but it was that time when I believed that Windows 98 was nothing more than Windows 95 + IE 4.01. Then I found OmniHTTPd in one of the PC Quest magazine’s CD, which had a PHP version included. Fact that PHP had no (or very little) books written for it was not a problem as the PHP documentation was more than enough to start working on it, and so I did. After upgrading to Win98 though, I moved to ASP (Win98 had PWS 4.0 supporting ASP) and returned to PHP in 2004.
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WordPress.com just now has updated its stats page somethings got better and some bitter.
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Hi.
You seem to have reached this page with great expectations but sorry to disappoint you that the BPL Mobile I adored when I originally wrote this post, no longer cares for its customers . They no longer serve properly when it comes to GPRS, and when you reach the customer care, they do nothing except for asking your date of birth and billing address each time you complain and end up with “it might be due to network congestion, please try again after an hour or two.”

Though officially you get an unlimited usage for Rs.561/- (499 + service tax), the regular outage and slow connections will end up with less than 500MB per month of usage.

I being dissatisfied with BPL (you can read more about it when you read ahead) was looking for alternate wireless solutions and my search ended with Vodafone’s USB Stick Rs.5999/- offer where you pay Rs.5999/- as advance rental for 12 months and get USB instrument free and 1GB of surfing each month for next 12 months. Though there is a limit of 1GB but at least it is higher than what one gets with an unlimited but slow and irregular BPL connection. Another alternative can be Idea Netsetter a similar USB device having initial cost of Rs.2490/- and recurring cost of Rs399/- (plus taxes) per month giving 1GB free each month (or Rs.299/- for 512MB limit). All usage above limit are charged at Rs.2/- per MB, the lowest I have seen with any of the operator.

I don’t have any info on how proper is MTNL’s service for its unlimited (for Rs.399) offer. Anybody having a feedback on it, please post it here for others to gain from it.

Considering that this page gets a daily 150 and above pageviews, I find it a better to inform my readers of the problems with BPL Mobile’s services (gone bad since May 2008 and existing till date).

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Below is what I had posted on earlier dates.

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BPL is unable to properly serve the GPRS users due to network congestion, particularly in Goregaon area. I am facing regular GPRS outage, even at late nights, since 28th May 2008. The customer care says problem can be solved only by Server upgrade which they cannot pinpoint when would happen, and till then they are sorry and don’t want me to call the helpdesk every now and then. On a previous occasion they went as far as suggesting me to unsubscribe.

This page has been viewed 2268 times as of now (01-June-2008 12:08am) and might have inspired many of the visitors to get BPL GPRS for themself too. Now I don’t think I should recommend it.

Update 17.06.2008: After more than three weeks of frequent outage and hopeless service, and after I mailed to customer care keeping Nodal Officer in cc, they seemed to show interest in solving the problem, but seeing no sign of improvement and their mail asking for 3 more days, I mailed my plan for opting out of the GPRS facility at the end of this billing cycle i.e. 19th. Outcome? I received a call asking for verifying my Handset settings. So my question is “what was all that stuff regarding upgradation and so…”

BPL used to advert “95% satisfied customers… we are working on the rest…”. From all the experience it seems to me that they achieved high satisfaction percentage not because they improved the satisfaction level of the “rest” but because the “rest” finally decided to opt out of their services thus in turn decreasing number of “dissatisfied” customers.

Waiting for next three days to see if their services get going back!

Update 20.06.2008 : After knowing that my voice will not be heard, I have decided to unsubscribe from BPL Mobile GPRS plan. Yesterday I called up the customer care and got myself out of the plan.

Update 18.07.2008 : Ever since I got myself unsubscribed, the BPL guys woke up giving me a call every other day. A few days back a Technical guy from their Network team visited my house and assured me that all problems would be sorted out. A day or two later I got a mail saying that a new tower is being installed in my area (though the surrounding area already have four of them).

What do you think? Should I subscribe again?

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Below is what the original post used to be.

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For those who are interested in using GPRS facility provided by BPL Mobile (Mumbai only) here are the brief n settings required for it. You can also use this for surfing Internet through you PC provided your PC is connected to your mobile using Data Cable or preferably BlueTooth.
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I currently didn’t had a net connection at home for the biggest reason that Mumbai requires you to move to a new house every 11 months if you don’t own one, thus requiring you to go for a new connection each time you make a move. To add to it I was also unsure of with whom should I go for connection which.
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The two pillar post in the first year were Get your WordPress.com Blog Google Verified and Get into Technorati Top 100 in 24 Hours that brought most views in a single day.
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This blog goes a year old today. What should I do to celebrate the anniversary! Site Redesign, a contest or what? And the idea that I finally settled to was to restart moving the blog in the direction that it aimed for!!
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