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I logged into Gmail this morning and found a new thing. I saw “Call Phone” in my contact list.

Contact list in Gmail

When I click on it, I saw the gmail chat window appearing and it was a phone dialer. There was a link in the dialer saying I need to install the plugin of Google voice. I did it Restarted the browser, logged into Gmail again, and now after clicking on “Call Phone” I saw the dialer and dialed a Canadian number and talked to a senior brother of mine. The voice quality was even better than that of direct phone call and there was no lag.

Google Voice Dialer

You can make unlimited free phone calls to USA and Canada. You can even call other countries with a nominal call rate. Moreover your account comes with $.10 credit free of cost so that you can make a test call to other countries. The call rate for Bangladesh is $.10 per minutes. Therefore you’ll be able to call a Bangladeshi number and talk 1 minute using the free credit.

You can find the calling rate in this link:  Call Rate of Google Voice

You can deposit money using credit cards. Anyway, this will be a very good news for people whose relatives live in USA or Canada – Enjoy unlimited free calls.

Qubee could well understand their lacking in business policy making. Their product design was not successful initially. They came up with more flexible packages later on. But still they found that Bangladeshi people are not responding well enough with their packages capped with data transfer limit. They are now offering two new packages withdrawing all previous offers of 256 & 512 kbps. The current packages are as follows:





Source: Qubee website

Initially the packages seemed very lucrative to me compared to many other available options in the market. I became curious and called the qubee hotline to know more about it. I asked the qubee representative what actually they tried to mean by “Fair Usage Policy”. They answered me that If some one’s usage is very high, they are going to warn the user at a certain point. This means with 256/512 kbps speed, if someone downloads continuously qubee is  going to “WARN” you that your usage is violating “FAIR USAGE POLICY”. Then I asked whether they are going to impose any restriction if someone violates the Fair usage policy. They answered me that the packages offer unlimited usage and they are not going to impose any restriction. Then finally I asked them what if someone continues to download violating the fair usage policy and the warning? To be honest they didn’t answer this question of mine directly.

What this means is that they will probably reduce the bandwidth after some time. This is not an old practice in Bangladesh. We have seen GrameenPhone/Citycell offering unlimited internet packages and after few days their throughput (Speed) going down when the number of subscriber went high. This will probably happen to qubee customers also.  These ISPs are there for business. The cost of dedicated 256/512 kbps is way higher than what qubee offers. 512 kbps dedicated bandwidth (through submarine cable) costs 9 thousand taka (1 mbps = 18 thousand taka). Qubee is offering it with 2250 taka.  I’ll leave the rest to your understanding.

The second WiMAX operator has started its journey in Bangladesh. As far as I could learn from Banglalion’s website, they are offering their services in selected areas of Dhaka City. But definitely they’ll spread out soon. Their offers are cheaper than the first operator – Augere (QUBEE). But they couldn’t get out of the download cap too like qubee. Their offers are as follows:





• 300tk activation fee applies (waive with 1 year sign up)
• Additional Usage Tk. 0.15/MB
• All charges are excluding VAT

Source: BanglaLion Website.

BanglaLion is offering three types of connectivity:

1. Connectivity through outdoor unit (costs 10000 taka, supports upto 6 users)
2. Connectivity through indoor unit (costs 7000 taka, supports upto 6 users)
3. Connectivity through WiMAX Dongle (A pen drive like device for single user)

Their offer’s are more diversified than Qubee. Currently they are offering 9 packages with different Bandwidth and download caps.

They are infact a step ahead than qubee by offering speeds upto 5 mbps. I hope BanglaLion’s entry will initiate a competition between the two operators and will ultimately bring out some really cool offers for their clients.

As soon as any audio album is released in Bangladesh – it is available for download in many Bangladeshi audio/video download sites. Drama and movies are also available for download in these sites within a very short time. This is causing a real time irreversible damage to the Bangladeshi Audio/Video industry. BTRC, understanding the fact, has taken an initiative to shutdown/block numbers of websites to protect the industry. I know this will annoy us a bit as we download our favourite music, drama or movies from these sites for free. But I personally believe that this will help our audio/video industry to flourish more – related people will be benefitted and will be encouraged more to create better things in future. Many of the audio/video production companies have complained to BTRC (from Confidential Sources) and have reported against numbers of websites that are allowing to download those companies’ materials illegally without their consent.

I am not sure how far BTRC can move, but publishers of these websites will definitely look for alternatives. May be some new beneficial groups will emerge in different forms.

It seems that Augere could learn something from the responses they got from their initial packages. They’ve refined their offers and it seems that they’ve started understanding what people want from them. Current packages are as follows:

Source: Qubee website

Even the modem price has gone down. This was required for them to compete against the existing wireless (or mobile) internet service providers. But they couldn’t get out of the volume based offers. Five (5) Gigabytes for 1250 taka is still high. If they want to get the attention of mass internet users they need to offer something for less than 700 taka with minimum 10 GB data transfer.

I recently encountered a problem with a Joomla website which had VirtuMart in it. I moved the whole joomla site from a demo server to an active server with the actual domain pointing to it. Everything worked fine as I did the required changes in the configuration.php of the joomla folder. But the VirtueMart component was still pointing to the old demo server path. I then googles a bit and found a very good solution. I changed the config file of the virtuemart component located at:

/administrator/components/com_virtuemart/virtuemart.cfg.php

The following two paths need to be changed with the new path:

1. define( ‘URL’, ‘http://demoserverURL/joomlafolder/’ );
2. define( ‘SECUREURL’, ‘http://demoserverURL/joomlafolder/‘ );

Instead of the “demoserverLink/joomlafolder” use your actual joomla folder link.

You might face a new problem while doing this. If you are using ftp to download the file “virtuemart.cfg.php” and re-upload it with the changed path, you may get an “Permission Denied” error. There is a good solution for this too. Install a joomla component named “Extplorer” or “JoomlaXplorer“. This component is a joomla admin panel component that gives you the power to upload/delete/edit files in the joomla site. After installing any one of these two components just browse through the file and edit the above mentioned two lines of the “virtuemart.cfg.php” file.

I could get rid of the problem this way, I hope the solution will be useful for anyone facing the same problem.

Atlast the WiMAX service is on AIR for the consumers of Bangladesh ( specifically for the people in Gulshan, Dhaka ). It has been more than a year several companies got WiMAX operator license in Bangladesh. People of Bangladesh has been biting nails and waiting for a superspeed connectivity. Well they have it now. But is it like what people expected? Augere Wireless Broadband started providing their service with the name: QUBEE. I have gone through their website and I was seriously disappointed with the packages that were there in their website.

People were expecting for a super fast connectivity with no restriction of internet usage.

Source: QUBEE Website

Do you really think these two packages can penetrate the ISP market in Bangladesh (or perhaps in Dhaka)? Are we not familiar with similar services already? Citycell launched Mobile highspeed Internet service months ago. Let’s look at their package:

Source: Citycell Website

Are the Qubee packages any special different from the Citycell’s offer? If mobility is the key issue I will say Citycell will be a better choice here due to their wide coverage area.  Otherwise there are many ISPs providing bandwidth to home/corporate users which are much cheap compared to Qubee.

Now let’s do some math. 1 mbps = 1/8 mBps. That is, in 1 minute you’ll be able to download 60/8 = 7.5 Mega Bytes. In 1 hour : 450 Mega Bytes. In this rate Qubee’s offered 9 GB will take 20 Hours to be consumed. If you download 10 DivX Movies (around 700 MB each) you’ll be able to consume the whole data Volume.  6200 taka data plan consumed in 10 Movie Downloads!! 620 taka per movie!! Really damn smart packages. I know people will say these are corporate bandwidth and are not supposed to be used for movie downloading. Well, what is the basic difference then?

Let’s consider my home Internet connection in home user’s category. I pay 1650 taka to Xnet for a 288 kbps connection. I get 30 KB (yes you are right, it’s Kilo Byte). At this rate I can download 2.6 GB per day and believe me my ISP doesn’t apply any cap on usage. Literally I can download 78 GB in exchange for 1650 taka only. Compare it with what Qubee is offering.

Now let’s consider the corporate needs. Corporate offices need seemless minimum guaranteed bandwidth for their operations. Now a days renowned ISPs charge around 14 thousand taka for 512 kbps and around 20 thousand taka for 1 mbps connection. That sounds too much compared to Qubee – isn’t it? Noooo… With the 512kbps/1mbps connections from the ISPs you can download in continuous 512kbps/1mbps for the whole month and the ISP is bound to ensure that. Now you can download for 720 hours with these ISPs at 512kbps/1mbps – compared to Qubee’s 20 Hours.

Why is Qubee charging so much!!! is this because of the WiMAX technology?? If that’s the benefit we were talking about WiMAX then I really doubt if it will be accepted by our Internet users or not. If Internet mobility is the issue, then I can say these types of mobile Highspeed internet was already there for quite a long time (ie, Accesstel’s NLOS technology, Grameen Phone’s 236 kbps Internet and Citycell’s 512 kbps Internet). If a new company launches its services with a new technology – A Buzz is required to penetrate the existing market. People will not accept this rubbish offer just to enjoy a new technology. Because when we buy or pay for anything we actually buy the services of what we are buying. Service is the important issue here. If the new technology doesn’t provide any better service, then either the company hasn’t utilized the technology perfectly or the technology itself is not efficient. But since WiMAX is running in other countries successfully we can say that Qubee’s business plan with WiMAX service is not perfect.

GoodLuck Qubee…

Hasibul Islam

23/10/09

http://hasibul.info/blog

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
and browser.turbo.enabled

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once. (Max can only be 8, but people report 30. The 30 open connections is incorrect)

Set “browser.turbo.enabled” to “true”

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.

4. FOR XP USERS SEEKING FASTER FIREFOX LOADTIMES: Within the Firefox “shortcut” icon properties add /Prefetch:1 (outside the quotation marks) of the ‘target. For example: my target is “D:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxfirefox.exe” /Prefetch:1

Chk dis out it really works

Source: NSUers Online Community

Bangladesh govt has finally lifted up the ban that was imposed on accessing youtube. I am really confused whether the ban has served the purpose it was imposed for. Rather, it grew curiosity among the people on what really caused the government to do so. Therefore I believe the output was infact negative, and the govt could sense so. But the damage has been done in the meantime. People of a democratic country thus couldn’t tolerate it.

People never like any restriction, specially it was a heavy shock to the newer generation. People now a days are dependent on youtube in many ways. It is not that they watch music videos, drama or use it for entertainment purposes only. Many tech savvy people depend on youtube for various video tutorials or other informative videos.

6th March 2007, 6 or 7 pm (not sure):

I found and error message when i tried to browse youtube.com . I tried to ping the site, the sites IP was resolved but it couldn’t ping. Then I tried the traceroute in command prompt ( tracert youtube.com). Again the IP was resolved but coudn’t trace a single node. I though it was a problem or a blockage at my ISP’s (xpressbd.net) side. I mailed them and in their reply they told me to check a few steps. I knew there wasn’t anything wrong at my side and mailed again. They again replied with the ping and traceroute result and concluding that it was a sort of blockage at BTCL end. However I called a few friends of mine some could access the site, and they were GP edge users. But others with different ISPs couldn’t.

There are more than 1 International Internet Gateway (IIG) in Bangladesh now a days (eg BTCL, Mango Telecom). I was unable to browse youtube.com from around 6/7 pm on 6th March. I asked a friend of mine who uses GP edge, and he said that He could browse youtube.com during 6/7 pm on 6th March. As far as I know GP uses bandwidth from both BTCL and Mango telecom and probably through V-SAT also. It could happen that the site was blocked/restricted from BTCL bandwidth first and then gradually Mango also followed. That’s because when I asked the same friend today (GP user) he said that he can’t browse today. It is possible to put restriction at every gateway. These are widely practised in China, Myanmar and many other countries where govt control the use of Internet. It is still possible someone can browse the site if they are using bandwidth directly from own V-SAT where it will take time for any authority to impose any kind of restriction.

Therefore I believe it can be some kind of restriction imposed on Bangladeshi Internet users, but I hope that it shouldn’t be a permanant one. It can be because of the current situation caused by the BDR mutiny incident. Youtube hosts numbers of videos/interviews of the BDR mutiny incident.