Dhaka: Registration of dot bangla domain at customer level would be started soon as Bangladesh has been officially allotted the rights on it after long process.

State-owned Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited (BTCL), the assigned organization to handle the domain, has almost completed preparation to start distribution among the users within few days, said officials.  

Talking to BSS, BTCL Director (Public Relation and Publication) Meer Mohammad Morshed said: ‘We would seek application from the users soon for .bangla after completing some administrative procedures.’

Mentioning that they've already completed agreement paper, he said: ‘customer could do all procedures for .bangla through online while registration fee would be received using state-owned mobile phone operator Teletalk.’  

He, however, said before moving to seek application, final approval has to be taken from posts and telecommunications division (PTD).

The BTCL Director hoped the approval procedures would be completed by a week.  

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, State Minister for Posts and Telecommunication Tarana Halim on Wednesday told BSS.  

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.

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 in Bangla fonts in the browser.

Terming the winning of .bangla domain as another milestone for identity, Tarana Halim said: ‘It's one more achievement of Bangla language after endorsing February 21 as International Mother Language Day.’  

Overcoming a long procedural fight, Tarana said, Bangladesh has won it due to the strong role of posts and telecommunication division (PTD).

Relying to a query when the use of .bangla domain would start, the state minister who in now abroad to participate an official event said the process would start as early as possible.