Dot bangla domain launched

The much-awaited dot bangla (.bangla) domain was unlocked for the people today as prime minister Sheikh Hasina inaugurated it at a function.

The premier opened the dot bangla (.bangla) internet domain at a ceremony at her official Ganabhaban residence in the city this noon.

State-owned Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited (BTCL), the assigned organisation 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 4 October after a long process.

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 Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology informing the decision on 4 October.

Indian state of West Bengal and Sierra Leone, one of whose official languages is Bangla, had also applied for the internationalised 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.

Domain names, such as 'bssnews.net', were originally designed only to support ASCII characters. In 2003, a specification was released that allows most Unicode characters to be used in domain names. IDNs are supported by all modern browsers and email programmes, so people can use links in their native languages.

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