PM to open dot (.)bangla domain on 31 Dec

The much-awaited dot bangla domain would be unlocked for the people on 21 December.

“Prime minister Sheikh Hasina has given her consent to inaugurate the dot bangla domain on 31 December at a ceremony at Ganabhaban,” posts and telecommunications division secretary Faizur Rahman Chowdhury told BSS on Thursday.

Later, the domain would be distributed among the people, he added.

State-owned Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited (BTCL), the assigned organization to handle the domain, has completed preparations to start distribution of dot bangla domain among the users after it has been officially allotted to Bangladesh on October 4 after a long process.

After getting the right, state minister for posts and telecommunications Tarana Halim had said that they want to unlock it for the people in the month of victory, as the country attained independence on 16 December.

Officials said the BTCL would call for application for the domain. They said customer could complete all procedures for .bangla through online while registration fee would be received using state-owned mobile phone operator Teletalk.

The International Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICAAN) has officially allotted the dot bangla (.bangla) internet domain to Bangladesh.

The ICANN sent a letter to the posts, telecommunications and information technology ministry informing the decision on 4 October.

Indian state West Bengal and Sierra Leone, one of whose official languages is Bangla, had also applied for the internationalized domain name (IDN) label-dot bangla.

Earlier, ICANN-approved another domain label for Bangladesh as dot bd or .bd. From now on, .bangla is Bangladesh’s own Unicode domain label.

It is the second country code top-level domain (TLD) for Bangla websites.

According to the BTCL, total registered users of .bd have reached 36,500.

Therefore, users can go to the BTCL website (www.btcl.com.bd) by typing btcl.bangla in Bangla fonts in the browser.