Being one of the early adopters of GPRS in Kerala, I thought I knew what’s going on with BSNL GPRS. Time and again I was proved that my knowledge is limited. I wanted to change my GPRS Plan to Plan 199 and had thought that required a letter. I had suggested to BSNL employees and customer care how easy it would be if that was possible through SMS. In fact it was possible for Prepaid customers and I was told Postpaid users are less and the feature is likely not to be implemented. For me to give the letter to customer care I have to travel around 80 kms in total and wait for the activation. Now with my friend in BSNL office I was confident I could get it done fast. To my surprise I was told it can be done by sending an SMS.

So the procedure is as follows.

To deactivate BSNL GPRS on postpaid connection

Send an SMS to 53733 (3733 was the suggested number but with the new numbering an from the reply SMS no that I got it should be 53733) with the following message.

GPRSD

For activating Plan49 send GPRS49 and for Plan 199 send GPRS199 to 53733. You’ll get a reply SMS asking for confirmation to which you got to reply with GPRS49Y and GPRS199Y respectively. The activation seems to take more time than deactivation and it could take upto 24hours.

The important thing about the service was that it was notified by BSNL officially and it will probably work for only customers in the south zone.

A search with google lead to this doc http://www.ap.bsnl.co.in/mmsgprs/Portal%20link%20documents/Manual-Device+Settings.doc Why can’t they summarize the information and present it decently ? Looks like I got to do it, with all major mobile service providers, their data plans, APN names, activation and deactivation procedures etc would make good blog post.