GPRS on BSNL prepaid – A Kerala experience
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006
I have a BSNL prepaid mobile connection. For a long time I wanted to enable GPRS and MMS on it. But being a prepaid connection I was unable to get it working.
Then last week I got the following message on my mobile.
Now GPRS Internet service is available for prepaid users. To enable send GPRSPRE to 3733.
Great! I immediately sent GPRSPRE to 3733. I got the following automated response from 3733 in a few minutes.
Your request for activation of GPRS received, please wait for confirmation SMS.
After some time I got another message from 45619.
Your cellone MMS service is active. please visit http://mms-sz.cellone.in for help on MMS. Your login name: xxx and password: xxx.
Then after 10 minutes I got this.
Congrats, GPRS/MMS successfully activated. To download settings please sms make model ex, NOKIA 6600 to 8355 or visit www.cellone.in
My mobile is Sony Ericsson 750i. So I typed “Sony Ericsson 750i” and sent it to 8355. The response was,
Sorry the format is not correct. Please send …..
The sample mentioned Sony Ericsson T610 so I tried that. Immediately a message popped up,
Do you want to install?
I clicked yes. After this I tried to access internet. The only page working was the cellone-portal link which newly appeared in the internet services menu. No other Web page was accessible.
When I looked at Internet profiles there were 3 profiles (bsnl-wap, cellone-portal and bsnl-mms). The current one was cellone-portal. I changed it to bsnl-wap. Voila! I was able to access Google and rest of the Web. Later I realized that cellone-portal is for downloading ringtones and mp3 files from cellone site and bsnl-wap is for internet access.
Bsnl-mms profile is for enabling MMS. This allows you to send multimedia content to other mobiles. But unfortunately MMS was not working. Then I realized that the settings downloaded were wrong. I found the correct setting here. Finally, MMS was also up and running!
BSNL charges 1paisa/KB for post paid and 2paisa/KB for prepaid. A bit costly so I access most of the Web pages with images disabled.
For Gmail, Google offers a Java application which can be downloaded from mobile. This application is not working on my mobile probably due to some settings problem at the BSNL side. I wish it will work soon since it offered a nice and compact interface to Gmail..
