For a travelling guy like me, living abroad without family makes internet the key communication media. The Internet became the bridge between me and my family, and keeps us connected all the time. Which obviously makes us feel like at home all the time.

The term “broadband” in Bangladesh became a joke. I always pay premium price for my internet service but it is very unfortunate that I did not get any satisfactory service ever from any ISP. Guys started to call broadband providers fraudband providers only because the providers do not take their business seriously.

It’s more than 2 years since I have subscribed to an ISP called Link3. With their 1 mbps fibre service I was feeling like flying in the cyberspace. But since last month they made the subscribers of Dhaka Uttara zone guinea pigs and started to pilot an unfit/untested/inappropriate platform. On 21st February they have forced all the subscriber of that area to move into the new(!) platform which was not even ready yet. Well, leaving other troubles apart, they have disconnected the connection of all the users of this zone on 1 March 2015 at 1 am and sent SMS notification at 2:30 am. The SMS says that users have to pay the monthly bill in advanced to stay connected. Now how on earth the users will pay the bills in the middle of the night?

I called the Service Deliver Manager and she lied to me about the SMS delivery time. She said the SMS sent to the users days ago, I checked with few other friends in that area and everyone has received SMS after midnight service disconnection. Finally my family back their managed to pay the bill but the connection has not been restored yet. These are the people I have called:

• Afsana Ali – Manager, Service Delivery – Cell: 01733911869
• Md. Saiful Huq (Suhan) – Assistant Manager, NMC & HD – Cell: 01913743230
• Bushra Salahuddin – Manager, NMC & Helpdesk – Cell: 01610001023

And none of them has been able to restore the service. This is a friend’s post on Facebook complaining about their service few days back:

This post expresses the frustration of an ordinary user. My point is why an user has to suffer, why we have to be so frustrated with a service and why service providers gets any chance to make us guinea pigs of their unfinished/untested work?

I do not want to blame the ISP. Actually we let them sell shit to us. We pay taxes and public servants just takes the salary home. We have a joker organisation called Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission, it is a mystery what they do apart from fining cell phone operators for illegal VOIP usage. I never compare Bangladesh with any other country, this is what I just do not like to do. We have what we have and in my point of view we have more than what many people do not have. But besides what we have, perhaps our lazy ass public servants can make some regulations like other countries have. The term broadband means a subscriber has to get 25 mbps download speed in the USA. Cannot our BTRC make a broadband definition? Cannot a regulation define if a subscriber suffers downtime for more than X amount of time, than ISP has to give them free internet for Y time or cash patiently of Z amount? Is it very had to implement?

I wish someday they will weak up before it is too late. Else Digital Bangladesh motto would become a joke.

Update: After struggling for more than 48 hours Link3 failed to fix my connectivity and later gave me a public IP saying I have requested for that. This is a mail I have sent them while having some conversation regarding moving into private IP range:

I do not see anywhere I have requested fro any public IP for me. And only God knows if I have to pay for the public IP now!