I finally got an MTNL broadband connection at home (Mumbai). Since I decided to get my own TP-LINK modem+wi-fi router (a good value for money model that I plan to review after a couple of months of use), I had to do the modem settings on my own. The settings for some models are available on the MTNL site, but it was missing for my particular model. The modem’s default PPPoE dialer settings did not seem to work, so I decided to check out one of the MTNL documents, and here’s the configuration that I found:

Username: <phonenumber> OR <phonenumber>@a E.g. 12345678 OR 12345678@a

Password: <CA number> (you can find this from your bill, or by calling 1500 from the landline) E.g. 4567890123

VPI: 0

VCI: 32

(The VPI & VCI settings chosen by my modem were different due to which it failed to connect & I had to change them manually to the above settings)

Connection Type: PPPoE LLC

MTU: 1400 bytes (another setting that had a different default on my modem)

MRU: 1492 bytes

Default route: Enabled

NAT: Enabled

Firewall: Disabled

You can also set the DNS servers manually to point to OpenDNS (208.67.222.222/208.67.220.220) or Google’s DNS servers (8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4) which should prevent ISP level DNS blocking of sites, and most likely provide better lookup speeds.

Below is the D-Link modem settings from the MTNL document from where I have picked the settings.

As for the wi-fi settings, you can stick to the defaults – just don’t forget to secure your network using a passkey to keep away free riders.