CHENNAI: BSNL has finally taken note of the complaints of its pre-paid subscribers in south India, who were unable to recharge their phones during last week.

On Sunday, the service provider started sending text messages to them, introducing a direct recharge option via SMS. "This is a temporary measure to bypass the overloaded system. It involves some manual work, but we will carry it out until the congestion is relieved," says L. Kannan, General Manager, Mobile Services, Tamil Nadu Circle.

Under the system, Cell One customers can SMS to 3733, mentioning the letters `RC', followed by the recharge coupon number and the secret code on the scratch card. An SMS confirmation will be sent in half-hour.

Subscribers can also recharge one another's phones using this option.

Later this month, BSNL will launch electronic recharging through its Channel Top Up Franchisee scheme, which will be introduced in the Tamil Nadu, Chennai, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh circles. Mr. Kannan explains that each franchisee will pay BSNL an advance sum from which money will be debited as and when they recharge talk time. Through these steps, BSNL hopes to reduce the congestion that made recharging a nightmare across south India for over a week.

The culprit

He says the problem was caused by issues of incompatibility between the two different systems from Nortel-Ericsson and Motorola-Siemens.

Recharge requests from a Nortel phone using a Motorola coupon or vice-versa have to be re-routed to a common voucher recharge system in Hyderabad, which was unable to cope with the increased load as the financial year came to an end.

The problem aggravated as subscribers made repeat attempts.

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