Flying abroad from India- Things to take care

If you are traveling abroad to any location outside India, please ensure that you carry the following:

• Passport- See if it ECNR stamped. If not get it done
• Ensure that the passport is not expiring in next one year. This is a requirement especially in case of Visa on Arrival (VoA)
• Get Visa stamped unless it is place like Thailand and Bali where it is VoA
• See if the Visa stamped is valid for the day of stay
• Ensure that you have all the transit visa in place, if it is not a direct flight. This is needed especially when you transit route is through Europe. Check this with your travel agent.
  
• In case of VoA, carry passport size photos, some place may require it. carry the one with white background.
• Insurance letter- This is a must and should be valid for the period of stay. This covers against some disease when you are abroad, loss of passport and baggage.
• Tickets- It should be the normal tickets. Avoid e-tickets and see you have the return ticket also issued.
• keep a copy of passport in other baggage as a precaution.
• Carry Forex money in dollars.

Enjoy the trip abroad!!

Broadband connection- Go wireless!!

Recently i came across the charges for WiMaX (this is similar to the WiFi but can give higher bandwidth) from VSNL. It is 1124 per month for postpaid (if you pay 4 months charges in advance). This compares well with 900 per month for dataone unlimited plan. Buy a WiMax terminal and connect it to the WiFi hub, u will not have the local loop cut and service quality can improve. Also this is the launch price and will drop with time.

I heard similar prices from Reliance also is available. So before taking your dataone or Airtel broadband see if you really need DSL based fixed connection. But remember one thing that the WiMaX is still a shared medium and there can be drop in the data rate as the number of customer increases.

Paying DataOne Bills Online

One problem i had was how to pay the BSNL bills. And i dont like any solution other than the one which is online. So here are my findings after i tried different options.

There are two options:

• ICICI Bank account: If you have a ICICI account. You can use the bill pay facility for paying your bills. First time you have to register with your Customer ID and phone number. The bill from the following month will then pop up in the bill pay section which can be payed off as normal fund transfer option.
• Credit card: register yourself with your telephone bill @ http://www.bangaloretelecom.com/. Once You have registered it will show the bills which are yet to be paid. Click on the "pay" option and then you can use your credit card to pay the bill.
  

So now enjoy paying BSNL dataone bills from the comfort of the house. this at least works in Bangalore. Please check if it works in other places.