Shocking bill

Oops!!!

It was a huge shock for me when my monthly BSNL phone+broadband bill came. Each month for my Home-500 dataone connection, I usually get around Rs. 750/- as bill, which includes an unused landline rent. But this month it had shot up four fold. Ok, now rather than calling up the customer service and giving them tirades, I wanted to see if I could reason out if the bill was right or not.

A few assumptions that I made had been wrong in my internet usage. I was thinking that I would be charged only for my download bandwidth - but the bsnl website states that the monthly cap is a cumulative of both upload and download traffic. Next, I was assuming that the free time starts from 12 midnight through till 8 am the next morning, but unfortunately, it starts only at 2am in the morning and extends the next six hours.

I went to the 'check usage' in dataone website and then tried to pull out the records related to my usage over the last month. I was able to get the traffic details over all the month with respect to each chunk of my contiguous online time. Seeing the records, I was able to atleast convince myself that the bill was indeed true. Atleast, thanks to BSNL for providing this cross checking facility.