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Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

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.

Source:  The Financial Express

By:  Engr. Nurul Basher
Ex-Director (Microwave) BT&T

The government has been taking hard actions against some telecom operators who are purportedly using their internet facilitates for making international telephone calls. The operators are being fined millions of takas, their most valuable equipments are being confiscated and some are being banned from continuing such operations.

As a former Bangladesh Telegraph & Telephone Board (BT&T) official, I still do not understand as to why VOIP should be declared illegal in the first place. To put it simply, I understand VOIP is transmitting speech signal through the internet bandwidth. The operator is paying his rent for the internet band width. Also he is paying for the telephone line rent and call charges. Capability to transmit voice over internet band width is made possible through the advancement of signal processing technology. Why should someone be punished for using higher technology?

I recall when in the early 1980′s fax machine was introduced, BT&T used to charge an additional amount of Tk 10,000/- per fax machine. By then I left BT & T and used to have heated argument with my friends in the BT & T top management about the matter. They introduced this charging system only because they found an extra income source without contributing anything.

Today, VOIP is declared illegal as BT & T is being unable to provide cheap service which the IP service providers are contributing. If BT & T is loosing revenue because of VOIP use by the internet operators, then it is BT&T’s fault. It is like punishing a motor bike rider by a bullock cart driver as the latter cannot catch up with the former. It is single stupidity and wrongdoing by someone who is short of in knowledge. I like to ask the authorities concerned to come clean and prove that VOIP is illegal because it is harmful to the people in the way toxic drug import is illegal because it harmful to national health. Following a bad law, even if it is a law, is harmful to the nation in the long run.

I call for a national debate and let the authorities concerned defend themselves to prove what they are doing by declaring VOIP “illegal” is right.

Getting virus infected is a daily occurrence for our pendrives. I never mind because I do have a very good virus protection tool, which will not allow the virus to spread into my system. In some cases what the virus does is that it hides all the folders, Changes widnows file/folder view options. Sometimes it doesn’t allow you to change the folder view settings. Well.. that matter is described in the following link:
Problem with “Show Hidden Files & Folders” in windows Folder Option – WORM_AUTORUN.RW

But here I’m going to share a new thing with you. After you clear up the viruses, after you fix the “Show hidden Folder option”- you may face that you are unable to unhide the folders in the pendrive. Those files/folders will remain Hidden as many times as you want to unhide them. If that’s the case I simply copied the contents of all the hidden folders to my local drive and then format the Pendrive (Pretty simple solution). But recently I faced this problem with the pendrive like storage of my LG Arena Phone set. This phone has a 8 GB internal memory and I often use it as a pendrive. Unfortunately I plugged this phone into a virus infected PC and it got virus infected too. I cleared up the virus files, but was unable to unhide the folders. Now, here I can’t just format the whole storage as there were many other system folders for that phone. I started googling and found a pretty simple solution at kioskea website. The solution was something like this:

1. click start>>run>>type in “cmd”
2. type the location of your flash drive.. e.g. “d:”, “e:”, “f:”, etc..
3. type “dir /ah”
*you will now see the files/folders with hidden attributes
4. type “attrib [name of file/folder] -r -a -s -h”
*if you’re going to unhide files, you should type the whole name plus the extension (format).. example “attrib picture.jpg -r -a -s -h”
**if you have folders with 6 characters and above, type the first 6 characters then “~1″.. example for folder named “birthday”
“attrib birthd~1 -r -a -s -h”
5. you should repeatedly type dir /ah after unhiding some files/folders so you’ll know if they’re now working or not..
6. now check your flash drive.. it should be there..

I hope this will help you if you are facing the same problem as mine.

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.

Download this template designed by myself:

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