Configuring a Dial-up Connection…

Are you surprised that I have written a blog on Dial-up connection? Which no body uses these days. Dial-up is not used regularly. But consider the situation when you travel to your village which doesn’t have broad band connection and internet cafes and you need to send an important mail or make a travel reservation. I have faced similar situations and would like to share with you how can you go online within a few minutes.

Even tough Broad Band internet is not available these days you can find a computer and Telephone in every village. I assume you will get your hand on some laptop/computer or you have carried your laptop to your village, which has an inbuilt modem and drivers installed.

The next thing you need to come online is a Telephone and Internet Connection. BSNL has enabled Internet across all its telephone exchanges in India. The Dial-in number is 172233 and the user name and password would be netone. The service would be charged 60 Paise/1min and you get transfer speeds or 2-3 KBps. Not good for Bandwidth Hungry websites, but will do ok with some mails and chat and some browsing.

As most PC’s have XP, I pre-assume you are using Windows XP, if you are using Windows 98 or Vista the basic process would be the same but the menus may change. Next thing is to configure a dialup connection. Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Network and Dial-up Connections. Double click Make New Connection, Select Next, Select Dial-up to Internet, Select Manually Configure Settings and enter 172233 for the Phone Number and netone for username and password, follow the wizard, complete it.

A new connection should appear in the Control Panel > Network Connection. You can place a short cut on the desktop for easy accessibility. Click Connect and you get a message No Dial Tone. You check your phone and you have Dial Tone. This is where most of the people get struck.

TIPS: Remembers most of the Computer Devices like Modems are designed and developed outside India and they use different communication systems. So even tough you have a Dial Tone on your phone the Modem would not recognize the Dial Tone. You need to configure the Modem not to wait for Dial Tone.

To do this go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Phone and Modem Options and go to the Modem Page select the modem and click the properties. And remove the Check for Wait for Dial-tone before dialing.

Now you should be able to connect to the internet without any issues.

TIPS: Open Internet Explorer, Go to Tools > Internet Options. Go to the Advanced Tab. Scroll down to Multimedia and remove the checks for Play Animations, Videos and Sounds in webpage’s. This would save some bandwidth and lets pages load faster on slow dial-up connections.

If you need any further clarifications you can always reach me back with a comment or a mail.