Need some review of new BSNL Bharat Fiber FTTH Broadband Plans 777 / 1277

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Cloning the MAC unfortunately didn't work, I don't know if its the ONT or my OpenWRT router, but when the MAC address of my router's WAN interface matched with any of the MAC addresses of the ONT's interfaces (there are multiple), not necessarily the main interface, but even any of the WAN interfaces, it just didn't work, I couldn't even ping the ONT.

I tried to change the ONT's WAN interface MAC addresses, but unfortunately didn't work. :( I might just need to get the MAC address binding reset from BSNL's side.

So finally, I got the bridge mode thing done. So it was the MAC binding on BSNL's side, on their PPP authentication server to be precise (and nothing to do with the OLT). I had called the BSNL exchange and they advised to get in touch with the LCO who would co-ordinate with the BSNL guys (I don't know why, but BSNL could have helped me directly )

Anyway, so I reached out to the LCO contact person, he connected me to his tech guy who helped co-ordinate with BSNL. At first I directly shared my primary router's WAN side MAC address with him so that BSNL can pre-configure it. That didn't work out for some reason. Then today the LCO tech guy asked me to configure PPPoE with test credentials which he shared (bbtest was the username). For this user, authentication completed successfully from my primary router (and I was relieved that there was no config error on my side ;)), I then informed the LCO tech guy who in turn spoke to BSNL and then they updated the config on their end to allow authentication from the new MAC address. I was then able to configure my own creds and things just worked!


TBH it took a good 3-4 weeks to get this done (I agree I wasn't following up constantly), but at the most this should have been just a support ticket raised through their site / call center. Now I had to jump through too many hoops to actually get this working.

Anyway I'm glad that it's finally done!
 
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So I've been noticing something interesting since I added monitoring to detect when the internet goes down. (I use Cron Monitoring - Get Alerts When Your Cron Jobs Fail | Healthchecks.io)
Every day between 12 AM to 1 AM, the PPP link drops exactly twice. The timing isn't fixed, but it happens within this one hour, maybe a few minutes here and there. It reconnects quickly within a minute or so. I wonder if its some daily reboot or something, but then the lack of a fixed timing puzzles me. The logs confirm that the PPP link errors out and it indeed reconnects. Will need to do some digging to see if its my LCO's OLT that gets restarted or if its BSNL's PPPoE authentication server which gets restarted or something.

STnZ2eY.png


(To the obvious question as to how the failure notification gets sent, I have a backup WAN (Jio 4G) so when BSNL goes down, it fails over to that, which you can notice from the IP address sending the failure notification)
 
Anybody tried the annual plan cash back offer? For annual plans, we anyway need to pay only for 10 months, plus we get 25% cash back.

The cash back would be exclusive of GST, so if you opt for the 500 GB annual plan, I think it will come to
Rs 777 * 10 ie Rs 7770 + GST = Rs 9168 plus a cash back of Rs 1942 which would cover for 2 months including GST.

So it comes down to pay for 10 months, get service for 14 months ie Rs 655 per month incl GST as compared to Rs 916 pm for monthly payments.


SAVE_20190306_122755.jpeg


This didn't work out as I had hoped :( They billed me for the whole 12 months and not the discounted annual amount as displayed on their site ie Rs 7770. I have registered a complaint, hopefully it can be fixed.


Source
 
So I've been noticing something interesting since I added monitoring to detect when the internet goes down. (I use Cron Monitoring - Get Alerts When Your Cron Jobs Fail | Healthchecks.io)
Every day between 12 AM to 1 AM, the PPP link drops exactly twice. The timing isn't fixed, but it happens within this one hour, maybe a few minutes here and there. It reconnects quickly within a minute or so. I wonder if its some daily reboot or something, but then the lack of a fixed timing puzzles me. The logs confirm that the PPP link errors out and it indeed reconnects. Will need to do some digging to see if its my LCO's OLT that gets restarted or if its BSNL's PPPoE authentication server which gets restarted or something.

STnZ2eY.png


(To the obvious question as to how the failure notification gets sent, I have a backup WAN (Jio 4G) so when BSNL goes down, it fails over to that, which you can notice from the IP address sending the failure notification)

So I added more data to the health check pings, it scrapes the ONT web interface and gathers the optical power, link status etc and sends it along with the health check ping.

From this I think it's the LCO's OLT device which loses power or some device in between which resets. I'll monitor for some more days and reach out to the LCO, it definitely helps when you have hard data to show that the link was down. :D

IUIScGW.png
 
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