BSNL Bharat Fiber Broadband review

BSNL – Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited a central public sector undertaking company inaugurated by Government of India on 1st October in the year 2000. It’s been a long 23 years and the company is still thriving and giving a good compition to the current top players in telco industry such as Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel. But today we are going to talk about the Bharat fibre broadband provided by BSNL and know how does it perform. I have been using BSNL Bharat fibre for more than 2 years now. So I think I will be the right person to give a review for the BSNL’s Bharat fibre.

Getting the Fibre connected

It was May 2021 when I applied for the first time through the Bharat fibre website. Waited for almost 1 month. Did not receive any update on the fibre connection from the BSNL team. Then in June (after 35 days from applying from the website), I contacted one person from my area who also took BSNL fibre connection at that time. From him I got my local SDO’s phone number and I reached the person through call and applied for a BSNL fibre connection.

The very next day BSNL team came and did the wiring (fiber wiring) to my home and provided the Nokia Siemens ONU at my place in the morning time. The same day around the evening 4:30 PM I received another call from my SDO stating my connection is now active and he shared one ID and password for the setup and helped me through the ONU setup page. The set up was quiet easy and the person was on call till the connection was active (meaning I can play YouTube videos now).

Cost

I applied for the Bharat fibre conection direct from the local BSNL office (not from any franchise), and the person from the BSNL office said they have some offer going on where I won’t be charged any installation fee. The only fee I had to pay was the wiring cost, and the security deposit and one months advanced bill payment.
The wiring cost = 1000
Security = 500
One months advanced bill = 706 (since I took the Fibre Basic Plus 60 Mbps plan)
Total I paid around 2206 rupees. I will not calculate the router fee here since I already had a D-link router with me. Because the old Nokia Siemens ONU did not come with the router inbuilt. So I had to connect with my D-link router in order to use internet via wi-fi.

My experience with Bharat Fibre connection

I was using a 60 Mbps plan where I was getting downloading speed almost 55-65 Mbps (yes sometimes I get 65 Mbps download speed) and uploading speed of 55-60 Mbps. Which was more than enough for my work from home set up. I live in Bhubaneswar, which is capital o Odisha. And in here the connectivity of BSNL is very good. I rarely face any downtime. In the total 2 years of fibre connection I have faced total 5-6 times downtime issue. Yes, you heard right only 5-6 times. Most of the time it will be for 10-15 minutes and it will be because of someone from our area or near local area was getting a connection.

And only 2 time internet was down for more than 1 day. The 1st time was due to an accident (a truck hit the electricity pole and so my internet was down for more than 1 day, on the 2nd day around 3-4 PM it was restored. And for the 2nd time it was due to local ISP provider (they cut the main fibre line which was coming to our colony from 2-3 placed).

BSNL service

While taking the BSNL fibre service I watched so many YouTube videos and read different blogs and forums about BSNL, as nowadays most of the people do the same while buying any new gadget or taking new internet connection, to compare it with the pro and cons. I found many different videos sharing different experiences out of which some were good and some were bad.

So, here I will give you my personal experience. I have a very wonderful experience with the BSNL fibre support team. As I am doing work from home, I need to be always connected to internet around 14-15 hours a day. Thus every time internet goes down I will be the 1st to report in my area (as far as I know I reports the 1st with in 2-5 minutes). When internet goes down within 2-5 minutes I call the BSNL technician (who installed the Bharat fibre at my home), reporting the issue. If it is related to any technical issue they fixes the issue with in 10-15 mins and informs me back like the issue is resolved and you can use the internet. As I already mention I did not face the issues regularly, it is mostly rare around 5-6 times in 2 years.

Speed

Now coming to the most important part- Speedtest. So when I was on Nokia Siemens ONU with 60 Mbps plan, I was mostly getting on an average 55-65 Mbps of download and 55-60 Mbps of uploading speed. And for my ping will be always around 30-35 ms. I rarely face any speed issue with my fibre connection. Sometimes when I feel like speed is dropping I restarted my router (old school ninja technique provided by my friend 😂, but it works).

Then after 6 months of using 60 Mbps plan I decided to move one level up to 100 Mbps plan. I went to my online portal and updated my plan to 100 Mbps. I felt soo good. But that happiness did not last for more time. I updated the plan to 100 Mbps and it was been 2-3 days I did not see a huge difference in speed, when I did the speed test, I got around 70 Mbps of down and 72-75 Mbps of upload speed. I was not happy at all. Then I reached my SDO stating my issue, he suggested to switch the ONU to Syrotech. Because the old Nokia router can max support 100 Mbps since it was old model it can not do 100 Mbps. So I decided to switch to Syrotech router.

The very next day I bought a Syrotech dual band router and changed my Nokia router. Since the new Syrotech has the wi-fi inbuilt I now do not have to use a separate router for using wi-fi. I did the setup with the help of BSNL technician and after the setup I started getting around 95-100 Mbps of down and upload speed.

The cons which I faced during these 2 years

Although I did not face any critical issue in the internet. But sometimes some web pages will not load properly in BSNL. Which I contacted to BSNL team also, For which I did not receive any satisfactory help from the team. But upon doing some reasearch in internet forum I found its the common issue from BSNL. So many people suggested to change the DNS and MTU size from the router settings. Which I also did, and I used google DNS and change my MTU size to 1460. After that the issues were resolved.

Summary

So in my 2 years of using BSNL fibre connection I am totally happy with the service provided by BSNL. Yes, there are Airtel Xtream fibre, Jio fibre are available in my area also, but I did not felt like switching to other as I do not see any strong reason from my side for switching.