BSNL is India’s largest telecom service provider with unmatched infrastructure. Mobile or land line services provided by BSNL is extremely competitive in terms of price and features. BSNL has forced other private players to offer better services and reduce their prices. The same has been happening in broadband service area. In Kerala for example, BSNL forced Asianet dataline to upgrade their infrastructure and provide broadband service up to a speed of 2mbps (previously Asianet was providing 128kbps "broadband"!)

But again when it comes to billing or online support for its services, BSNL lags behind everyone. It is so pathetic that sometime you wonder whether there is a conspiracy behind it! I will give you some examples.

Online payment of BSNL land line phone bills

There is no unified online billing system for BSNL. Some of the local BSNL offices (Bangalore for example) provide independent online billing. But when you are in Trivandrum, you cannot pay BSNL bill through credit card or net banking services.

Currently there is only one way to pay your landline bills online. If you have online banking service of SBI (State Bank of India), you can register BSNL as a biller by giving your consumer number and phone number. If everything goes well (which will take sometime) you can start paying your bills through SBI. I am yet to pay a bill successfully!

If you go to any of the main BSNL offices you can see long queues of people trying to pay their landline bills! Building an online bill payment system will only cost peanuts as far as BSNL is concerned. But still it remains a dream…

Erecharge coupons for BSNL prepaid services

BSNL mobile services are good in terms of price and service. The only problem is recharging your prepaid mobile service. There is currently only way to do this. Buy a physical recharge card, scratch it, send the 18 digit number to *123*.  There is no way to purchase these recharge cards online and there is no way to do an e-recharge through credit card or net banking.  What is surprising is the fact that selling these recharge coupons through online facilities is only going to increase the profit per card for BSNL since there is no dealer commission to be paid!

What BSNL should do?

BSNL should look at complete integration of its services across the country. It should also look at single billing system. A single online system to manage all the services provided to customer is a must. For example, I should be able to enable caller id feature just by clicking a checkbox. For e-recharge or any other valued added services, a feature similar to what is seen in Indian Railways online reservation system (operated by IRCTC) must be provided. IRCTC payment system is very impressive and it supports a wide range of Internet banking services, credit card payments and other payment systems as can be seen below.

I hope that this article becomes obsolete at least within a year of posting!