Tata Photon Prepaid Balance and Usage Details
by Sadik on 10/04/10 at 9:17 am
I recently wrote a small review of Tata photon prepaid. Since writing that review people have asked me how to check their balance left and usage details so I decided to share this:
How do I check my Tata Photon Prepaid Balance?
When I had bought my first tata photon datacard back in March, the customer care quite frankly told me that they do not have any balance checking facility yet by sms or online but it will come soon. Now I can at least confirm that the Usage Details are available through their website http://tataindicom.com and/or by registering your mobile number with them.
Method 1: By receiving balance updates by SMS
This one is simple. Just call their Customer Care Number 1800-266-121 and ask them to register your mobile number to receive balance updates by SMS. They will ask you to identify yourself. Just give them your Photon account details and ask them to register your mobile number.
If successful, you will receive SMS updates every time you use Photon to connect to the internet.
Method 2: From their website tataindicom.com
Here’s what you got to do.
- Open their website and first select your Location in the top of the page.
- Now take your mouse to “My Account” and click on “New User”.
- In the next page, select Account Type as “Prepaid”, and enter your 10 digit Photon prepaid number and your email address and Submit.
- Once you submit, you will be taken to another page where they will ask you for an alternate mobile number and ask you to submit again.
- Now, check your email. You would have received your password by email. This is the email I got:
- Now go back to tataindicom.com and login with your Photon Mobile number and password. They will ask you to change your password which is a bit of a pain… (special characters and uppercase and lower case etc. etc.
) - After logging in, you will find a text: Please Click here to view your Usage details. Clicking there will open a popup window where you have three options, SMS, My Profile and Usage Details.
- SMS: Shows all the SMS that have supposedly been sent to you about your account balance and other Photon details
- My Profile: Shows some insignificant detail, nothing really there.
- Usage Details: This is where you can see your Usage Details.
- To See your balance left, click on SMS and check the most recent SMS. That will tell you how much balance you have left.
- Click on Usage Details. You have to select the Date range for which you want to see the Usage Details.
- For example, this is what it shows for me for a particular date range:
Dear Customer,
Thank you for visiting www.tataindicom.com and registering your Photon+ account. The user ID and password for your Photon+ account is as follows
Password: xxxx
Please feel free to contact us for any further clarifications or assistance via email at cs.mumbai@tatatel.co.in or call us at 12524 from your TATA Indicom mobile phone or 9220012524 from a Non Tata Indicom phone.
Assuring you of our best services at all times.
Warm Regards
Team Tata IndicomThis is an automated message. Please do not reply.
So there we have it, here’s my Photon Usage Details!
Now obviously there are many things wrong with this.
Firstly the Usage details is given in bytes. Not everyone knows what that means or how to do the calculations. So let me explain,
For example, three rows for 4th April means I connected thrice on 4th April. The first time I connected I used a total of 12382141 byte. That means:
(12382141/1024) / 1024 = 11.8 MB
Secondly, the Usage details page does not show my total balance left. So if I had recharged with say 250 MB, I would need to add the values in TotalConsumed column and convert them to MB, then subtract the result from my original balance, phew!!!
So well, this is what we have till now! If you ask me, I am still gonna make that call to customer care and ask them how much balance I have left untill they make their website more user-friendly!
