October 28, 2009

Reliance netconnect - check your usage

Update December 14, 2009: Self contained exe for windows with a GUI - see here.

I have been using netconnect from reliance without any complaints for two months now. One problem, though, has been that the reliance website is fairly bad and it is not at all easy to verify your usage until you get the bill. When you log in and check your usage, what is shown is a huge table with the usage in kb for each session along with the session start time. So, if like me, you have a plan with a separate limit for nighttime, you have to download the csv file and then add up the usage yourself for sessions starting in the 'nighttime' and similarly for those starting in the 'daytime'. Seeing that many people have complained of being over-billed, it seems prudent to keep a tab on usage. While vnstat can give you the usage on any machine, it is less helpful when you use the account from multiple machines and also it does not seem to be easy to get usage for specified time limits.

So here is a small python script I wrote to get the usage information from the reliance website, calculate the split usage for daytime (6am-10pm) and nighttime (10pm-6am) and present the results in a human readable form. You can download the script here.

Here is the script in action -



Any comments and suggestions are welcome.