I am writing this review on 08-Sept-2011.
I have used BSNL CellOne(home network - Pune, Hadapsar, near Magarpatta) since the last 6 months.
There were a few good points about BSNL and some bad ones. I’ll state the good ones first:
Good points:
1) good STD plans. When I was trying to check plans from various service providers, CellOne’s 725 plan seemed to be the best one because of the huge number of free STD minutes that it provided. It brought down my bill by quite a substantial amount.
2) Adverts: BSNL didn’t irritate me with mindless quizzes and advertisements. The were a few advertisements delivered on SMS, but that’s tolerable. Also they didn’t autosubscribe me to any of their VAS services.
Now the downside:
1) Network coverage: To say that the network coverage is pathetic would be an overstatement. At some places there is no network coverage. At other places, the signal strength was weak and voice clarity suffered. This problem was experienced consistently in Pune, Navi Mumbai, Thane, Mangalore.
2) Network congestion: Even if you happen to see full network coverage on their home network, you might end up getting hung up arbitarily(within 2 seconds also). Other times, I couldn’t get full network signal strength and the conversation suffered from voice clarity. Some other times, I couldn’t even initiate a call.
2) MMS: CellOne has this restriction that you can send MMS only to another CellOne subscriber(confirmed by customer-care). I didn’t find this stated anywhere in their brochure, so be forewarned.
3) Activation of services: Their activation period for a postpaid connection was pretty long: about 4+ days. Other subscribers(Reliance-GSM-postpaid) do it in 4 hours. Also activation of National Roaming cannot be done via SMS. You need to visit their centre and submit a written application and that can be done only after a week of activation of the postpaid service. Also after submitting the application, they didn’t activate the service within the promised time-frame, I had to visit their centre and remind them, after which it was promptly taken care of.
4) SMS: CellOne has some problem with feedback mechanism with their SMS services. I sometimes get an SMS 8 times although it was sent only once. CellOne sometimes take a while(upto several hours) to deliver your SMS or other’s SMSes. Sometimes the messages were delivered multiple times to the receipient. Delivery reports were also not accurate.
5) Number Portability: If you have a CellOne Postpaid service, you cannot port-out to other provider. You can only do it for prepaid.(confirmed by customer-care)
The 2G internet service was mediocre(not too bad and not too good).
If you plan to take up CellOne, make sure that you don’t have network coverage or congestion issues. Take a feedback from another subscriber. If you don’t have one, I would suggest that you can take the risk ONLY IF YOU ARE NOT HEAVILY RELIANT ON YOUR CELLPHONE.