Have you used the premium dial-up internet service?

You may have known by now that Bangladesh Tar and Telephone Board (BTTB) has changed its name to Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Ltd. (BTCL). Moreover, it has started to offer a new range of communication services. Its Premium Dial-Up Service is perhaps the first of its kind in Bangladesh.

Premium Dial-Up service has a number of cool features that enable an internet user to browse more freely. One doesn’t need to register with any ISP by purchasing (1) a registration card and (2) a recharge card. All one needs is to have a land phone line and a modem.

According to BTCL, any of its telephone user can avail internet service by dialing the access code 0101234 (Multimetering) through his/her computer. The username is "bttb" and the password is "bttb".

The pricing is a bit ambiguous to me. According to BTCL’s website, “The internet usage charge will be automatically added with the telephone bill. The tariff for the internet use through this service is equivalent to the local telephone call charge.”

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An user of this service blogged:

Their download speed is average 5 Kilobyte/sec, I noticed this speed in Dhaka. For each 150 seconds or it's fractional usage you will be charged Tk 1.50. Simply I explain, the premium bill is 1 paisa per second, 60 paisa per minute and 36 Tk per hour. This is very expensive comparing rates of private ISPs. Because they offer 5 paisa to 30 paisa per minute usage depending on various plans. I know dialup internet is free in Italy for landline phone subscribers. But we in Bangladesh pay more and more to our service providers. In returns they give us dissatisfactory service in most cases.

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Nevertheless, it’s really good to see that the Government has started to rollover many of its policies these days. Let’s support them in their endeavours.

Painful job this jobhunting is...

Uploading a jobsite is hopefully the easiest job in Bangladesh it seems! Every now and then jobsites are emerging, back of buses, auto-rickshaws, minibuses etc. are the most preferred place to let know mass that yet another jobsite has appeared in the WWW. Lets name a few in the flock of bdjobs, jobsbd, jobstreet, prothomalojobs, chakri, grameenjobs, aiminlife, jobsa1 etc. Although people get help from the site and some are earning plenty, still the sites are doing their part in giving a lot of pain to the already stressed job-hunters.

Confusing business
bdjobs have already become a training venue for all possible areas of business. The site even ceaselessly fire emails inviting to those trainings if someone once filled up their e-resume. Needless to illustrate again that Bangladesh is a harbor of guidebooks, notebooks, photocopy, coaching centers, private tutors both walk in and home service, plagiarism, nakal bazi at school to university life and eventually training centers, trainers, trainees, training of trainers during work life (or before starting work). Another site jobsa1 also became a coaching center for newscasting and airline jobs. Quite a bit of web pollution it seems.

Jungles of pop-up, flash, links, posts
Homepage of all the jobsite is almost like a jungle, far distant from clarity, naturally takes prolonged time to download. Earning from advertisement is not wrong but it may be in a much smarter way such as how HBO, BBC, CNN do online business. Leverage more customer to visit more by offering clear, cozy, neat, speedy, functional screen and charging higher from the advertisers perhaps.

Misleading classification
Industry, ownership & function are different words, have different meanings. Sales and marketing is a function, not an industry; Telecommunication is an industry not a function, MNC is type of ownership not type of job (!) and so on. Jobsites sort job with no logic, force visitors to search every possible category for a single type of job. They may sort the job functionally and industry specific or vice versa. Moreover, understanding the company specific terms in generic sense is also important. Otherwise, account manager may be posted in finance & accounting type instead of corporate sales! Personal financial consultant of HSBC may be put into research & consultancy job instead of direct sales (or door to door sales)! It is not a big deal for the sorter to get idea of all possible functions in Bangladesh as total formal job market is very small, confined to some industry like FMCG, telecom, banks, insurance, leasings, newspaper, TV, radio, garments, textile, airline, consumer durables, IT products, health, electrical & mechanical machineries & equipments, real estate, ad, research, ngo etc.

Job outside Bangladesh
Jobstreet.com gives most pain in this regard. They unnecessarily mails/posts jobs in malyasia/Singapore although I have signed in .bd domain. In the name of overseas job other site also give substantial pain (basically link of other sites). Residing in Bangladesh (and having no residency, work permit, etc in the respective country) it is almost impossible to get a white collar job offer in Malaysia, Singapore, KSA as citizenship /residency permit is a prerequisite above all education & skill. May be, highly skill and demanded incumbent (specially in IT, Medicine, engineering) gets work permit from his/her employer from any part of the world.

So much so for the jobsites, linking job-hunters with job-givers have become a jolly good job, all at the cost of job-hungry netizens of Bangladesh.

--Abul Kalam Azad

Aktel blocks the call, blocks the harassment

Another testimony of the fact that intelligent managers and decision-makers of Bangladeshi corporates are keeping a close look into the conversation we are having in this growing business blog. Our fleet of business bloggers have been blogging on topics related with call blocking issues for over a year now. First it was raised under the title "Hey, mobile phone operators - listen up! " on July 20, 2007, then again on another post that followed titled "Growing Perversion Worries All But them.... " published on July 24, 2007. We sincerely thank Aktel for listening to us and introducing this service first time in Bangladesh for its customers. We hope other operators will wake up and introduce such innovative and useful service for their customers, it will surely help curb mob-teasing (mobile-teasing) for female consumers and for all in general. For all topics tagged with Aktel, see this page here.

The Daily Star reports that AKTEL, the third largest mobile phone operator has introduced a 'call block' service, by which its customers can enjoy independence on whether they receive unsolicited calls or not.Now Aktel's customers do not need to turn off their phone just to avoid unnecessary interruptions. They can just leave it to call block to filter all incoming calls. Aktel's move to introduce such service, which may reduce incoming calls to its network, was mainly taken following complains of fake voice calls by mobile users."This launch is yet another small step to come even closer to the people of Bangladesh, and win their hearts through developing truly customer-oriented products and services," said Jefri Ahmad Tambi, chief executive officer of Aktel. At the launching ceremony yesterday in Dhaka, Tambi said his company would bring more products to the market, within a short time, to educate users about the call block service.

Well....we would also love to keep educating consumers on the call-block service, Aktel has paid attention to the informal and raw conversation we are having here regarding their service, we would be happy to pay them back the favour.