BSNL gives the jitters to Internet subscribers

 The Internet subscribers of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) in the city faced much difficulty today because of the technical changes made by the public sector to its servers and network.

 Many people were left clueless to what was wrong with their Internet connection while some people tried the 1957 number provided by the telecom major for complaints but the number was busy all the time with huge number of customers trying for it.

 BSNL has the largest Internet subscriber base in the state with about 79,000 subscribers.

 The organisation's account information portal - www.sancharnet.in -- too got jammed with a large number of subscribers trying to log onto the site at the same time. Subscribers could not access the site till late in the evening.

 It all began with BSNL shifting its dial-up accounts of its hd1 and hd2 servers to Sancharnet (BSNL's national Internet backbone) from the existing VSNL network. Consequently the dial-up number for Internet access too changed from 172222 to 172233.

 The organisation transferred the accounts onto the new network at about 11 am today and since then subscribers started facing problems.

 Along with the transfer of accounts onto the new network, BSNL has also asked the users to change their log-in user ID to a different format and prescribed a too long procedure to register their new user id and password.

 Those who followed the guidelines too could not succeed in activating their accounts. Surprisingly, the organisation did not publicise the changes much except for small advertisements in news papers.

 Few subscribers received mails about the changes while a majority was ignorant of the development due to lack of communication by the service provider.

 Business Standard tried to contact various officials of the organisation to know the right procedure but none of them was able to prescribe the right procedure.