Tuesday, October 2, 2007

DUF (Dataone Usage Finder) BSNL Broadband Tool

http://duf.sourceforge.net/

Dataone is a broadband Internet service (www.bsnl.co.in/service/dataone.htm) offered by BSNL, a major ISP of India.. This service imposes an upload/download usage limit on its users. Usage between 2am and 8am is free, under certain schemes.
This makes it imperative for the users to keep an eye on their usage statistics. However, the BSNL website which provides these usage figures is not very useful, as any Dataone user will vouch.

Only the monthly total of the bandwidth used is provided. There is no provision for knowing the daily total. Also there is no demarcation between free time usage and paid time usage. These are the very figures a user would be most intersted in.

DUF (Dataone Usage Finder) is a very simple screen scraper program coded in VB6 (Yes guys, VB is still used!) which uses IE5 or higher, to fetch pages from the BSNL site, and after parsing out the required records, presents them in a manner which is more helpful. This data can also be saved as html files.

No comments: